A phoneme (/ˈfoʊniːm/) is one of the units of sound (or gesture in the case of sign languages, see chereme) that distinguish one word from another in a particular language. For example, in most dialects of English, the sound patterns /θʌm/ (thumb) and /dʌm/ (dumb) are two separate words distinguished by the substitution of one phoneme, /θ/, for another phoneme, /d/. (Two words like this that differ in meaning through a contrast of a single phoneme form what is called a minimal pair). In many other languages these would be interpreted as exactly the same set of phonemes (i.e. /θ/ and /d/ would be considered the same).

In linguistics, phonemes (usually established by the use of minimal pairs, such as kill vs kiss or pat vs bat) are written between slashes, e.g. /p/. To show pronunciation more precisely linguists use square brackets, for example [pʰ] (indicating an aspiratedp).

Within linguistics there are differing views as to exactly what phonemes are and how a given language should be analyzed in phonemic (or phonematic) terms. However, a phoneme is generally regarded as an abstraction of a set (or equivalence class) of speech sounds (phones) which are perceived as equivalent to each other in a given language. For example, in English, the k sounds in the words kit and skill are not identical (as described below), but they are distributional variants of a single phoneme /k/. Different speech sounds that are realizations of the same phoneme are known as allophones. Allophonic variation may be conditioned, in which case a certain phoneme is realized as a certain allophone in particular phonological environments, or it may be free in which case it may vary randomly. In this way, phonemes are often considered to constitute an abstract underlying representation for segments of words, while speech sounds make up the corresponding phonetic realization, or surface form.

Phonemes are conventionally placed between slashes in transcription, whereas speech sounds (phones) are placed between square brackets. Thus /pʊʃ/ represents a sequence of three phonemes /p/, /ʊ/, /ʃ/ (the word push in standard English), while [pʰʊʃ] represents the phonetic sequence of sounds [pʰ] (aspiratedp), [ʊ], [ʃ] (the usual pronunciation of push). This is not to be confused with the similar convention of the use of angle brackets to enclose the units of orthography, namely graphemes; for example, ⟨f⟩ represents the written letter (grapheme) f.

The symbols used for particular phonemes are often taken from the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA), the same set of symbols that are most commonly used for phones. (For computer typing purposes, systems such as X-SAMPA and Kirshenbaum exist to represent IPA symbols using only ASCII characters.) However, descriptions of particular languages may use different conventional symbols to represent the phonemes of those languages. For languages whose writing systems employ the phonemic principle, ordinary letters may be used to denote phonemes, although this approach is often hampered by the complexity of the relationship between orthography and pronunciation (see Correspondence between letters and phonemes below).

A simplified procedure for determining whether two sounds represent the same or different phonemes

A phoneme is a sound or a group of different sounds perceived to have the same function by speakers of the language or dialect in question. An example is the English phoneme /k/, which occurs in words such as cat, kit, scat, skit. Although most native speakers do not notice this, in most English dialects the "c/k" sounds in these words are not identical: in kit(help·info)[kʰɪt] the sound is aspirated, while in skill(help·info)[skɪl] it is unaspirated. The words therefore contain different speech sounds, or phones, transcribed [kʰ] for the aspirated form, [k] for the unaspirated one. These different sounds are nonetheless considered to belong to the same phoneme, because if a speaker used one instead of the other, the meaning of the word would not change: using the aspirated form [kʰ] in skill might sound odd, but the word would still be recognized. By contrast, some other sounds would cause a change in meaning if substituted: for example, substitution of the sound [t] would produce the different word still, and that sound must therefore be considered to represent a different phoneme (the phoneme /t/).

The above shows that in English [k] and [kʰ] are allophones of a single phoneme /k/. In some languages, however, [kʰ] and [k] are perceived by native speakers as different sounds, and substituting one for the other can change the meaning of a word; this means that in those languages, the two sounds represent different phonemes. For example, in Icelandic, [kʰ] is the first sound of kátur meaning "cheerful", while [k] is the first sound of gátur meaning "riddles". Icelandic therefore has two separate phonemes /kʰ/ and /k/.

A pair of words like kátur and gátur (above) that differ only in one phone is called a minimal pair for the two alternative phones in question (in this case, [kʰ] and [k]). The existence of minimal pairs is a common test to decide whether two phones represent different phonemes or are allophones of the same phoneme. To take another example, the minimal pair tip and dip illustrates that in English, [t] and [d] belong to separate phonemes, /t/ and /d/; since these two words have different meanings, English speakers must be conscious of the distinction between the two sounds. In other languages, though, including Korean, even though both sounds [t] and [d] occur, no such minimal pair exists. The lack of minimal pairs distinguishing [t] and [d] in Korean provides evidence that in this language they are allophones of a single phoneme /t/. The word /tata/ is pronounced [tada], for example. That is, when they hear this word, Korean speakers perceive the same sound in both the beginning and middle of the word, whereas an English speaker would perceive different sounds in these two locations. Signed languages, such as American Sign Language (ASL), also have minimal pairs, differing only in (exactly) one of the signs' parameters: handshape, movement, location, palm orientation, and non-manual signal or marker. A minimal pair may exist in the signed language if the basic sign stays the same but one of these parameters changes.[1]

However, the absence of minimal pairs for a given pair of phones does not always mean that they belong to the same phoneme: they may be too dissimilar phonetically for it to be likely that speakers perceive them as the same sound. For example, English has no minimal pair for the sounds [h] (as in hat) and [ŋ] (as in bang), and the fact that they can be shown to be in complementary distribution could be used to argue for their being allophones of the same phoneme. However, they are so dissimilar phonetically that they are considered separate phonemes.[2]

Phonologists have sometimes had recourse to "near minimal pairs" to show that speakers of the language perceive two sounds as significantly different even if no exact minimal pair exists in the lexicon. It is virtually impossible to find a minimal pair to distinguish English /ʃ/ from /ʒ/, yet it seems uncontroversial to claim that the two consonants are distinct phonemes. The two words 'pressure' /prɛʃər/ and 'pleasure' /plɛʒər/ can serve as a near minimal pair.[3]

While phonemes are normally conceived of as abstractions of discrete segmental speech sounds (vowels and consonants), there are other features of pronunciation – principally tone and stress – which in some languages can change the meaning of words in the way that phoneme contrasts do, and are consequently called phonemic features of those languages.

Phonemic stress is encountered in languages such as English. For example, the word invite stressed on the second syllable is a verb, but when stressed on the first syllable (without changing any of the individual sounds) it becomes a noun. The position of the stress in the word affects the meaning, and therefore a full phonemic specification (providing enough detail to enable the word to be pronounced unambiguously) would include indication of the position of the stress: /ɪnˈvaɪ̯t/ for the verb, /ˈɪnvaɪt/ for the noun. In other languages, such as French, word stress cannot have this function (its position is generally predictable) and is therefore not phonemic (and is not usually indicated in dictionaries).

Phonemic tones are found in languages such as Mandarin Chinese, in which a given syllable can have five different tonal pronunciations.

Here, the character 妈 (pronounced mā, high level pitch) means "mother"; 麻 (má, rising pitch) means "hemp"; 马 (mǎ, falling then rising) means "horse"; 骂 (mà, falling) means "scold", and 吗 (ma, neutral tone) is an interrogative particle. The tone "phonemes" in such languages are sometimes called tonemes. Languages such as English do not have phonemic tone, although they use intonation for functions such as emphasis and attitude.

When a phoneme has more than one allophone, the one actually heard at a given occurrence of that phoneme may be dependent on the phonetic environment (surrounding sounds) – allophones which normally cannot appear in the same environment are said to be in complementary distribution. In other cases the choice of allophone may be dependent on the individual speaker or other unpredictable factors – such allophones are said to be in free variation.

Some linguists (such as Roman Jakobson and Morris Halle) proposed that phonemes may be further decomposable into features, such features being the true minimal constituents of language.[11] Features overlap each other in time, as do suprasegmental phonemes in oral language and many phonemes in sign languages. Features could be characterized in different ways: Jakobson and colleagues defined them in acoustic terms,[12] Chomsky and Halle used a predominantly articulatory basis, though retaining some acoustic features, while Ladefoged's system[13] is a purely articulatory system apart from the use of the acoustic term 'sibilant'.

In the description of some languages, the term chroneme has been used to indicate contrastive length or duration of phonemes. In languages in which tones are phonemic, the tone phonemes may be called tonemes. Though not all scholars working on such languages use these terms, they are by no means obsolete.

By analogy with the phoneme, linguists have proposed other sorts of underlying objects, giving them names with the suffix -eme, such as morpheme and grapheme. These are sometimes called emic units. The latter term was first used by Kenneth Pike, who also generalized the concepts of emic and etic description (from phonemic and phonetic respectively) to applications outside linguistics.[14]

Languages do not generally allow words or syllables to be built of any arbitrary sequences of phonemes; there are phonotactic restrictions on which sequences of phonemes are possible and in which environments certain phonemes can occur. Phonemes that are significantly limited by such restrictions may be called restricted phonemes.

In English, examples of such restrictions include:

/ŋ/, as in sing, occurs only at the end of a syllable, never at the beginning (in many other languages, such as Māori, Swahili, Tagalog, and Thai, /ŋ/ can appear word-initially).

/h/ occurs only before vowels and at the beginning of a syllable, never at the end (a few languages, such as Arabic, or Romanian allow /h/ syllable-finally).

In non-rhotic dialects, /ɹ/ can only occur immediately before a vowel, never before a consonant.

/w/ and /j/ occur only before a vowel, never at the end of a syllable (except in interpretations where a word like boy is analyzed as /bɔj/).

Some phonotactic restrictions can alternatively be analyzed as cases of neutralization. See Neutralization and archiphonemes below, particularly the example of the occurrence of the three English nasals before stops.

Biuniqueness is a requirement of classic structuralist phonemics. It means that a given phone, wherever it occurs, must unambiguously be assigned to one and only one phoneme. In other words, the mapping between phones and phonemes is required to be many-to-one rather than many-to-many. The notion of biuniqueness was controversial among some pre-generative linguists and was prominently challenged by Morris Halle and Noam Chomsky in the late 1950s and early 1960s.

An example of the problems arising from the biuniqueness requirement is provided by the phenomenon of flapping in North American English. This may cause either /t/ or /d/ (in the appropriate environments) to be realized with the phone [ɾ] (an alveolar flap). For example, the same flap sound may be heard in the words hitting and bidding, although it is clearly intended to realize the phoneme /t/ in the first word and /d/ in the second. This appears to contradict biuniqueness.

Phonemes that are contrastive in certain environments may not be contrastive in all environments. In the environments where they do not contrast, the contrast is said to be neutralized. In these positions it may become less clear which phoneme a given phone represents. Some phonologists prefer not to specify a unique phoneme in such cases, since to do so would mean providing redundant or even arbitrary information – instead they use the technique of underspecification. An archiphoneme is an object sometimes used to represent an underspecified phoneme.

An example of neutralization is provided by the Russian vowels /a/ and /o/. These phonemes are contrasting in stressed syllables, but in unstressed syllables the contrast is lost, since both are reduced to the same sound, usually [ə] (for details, see vowel reduction in Russian). In order to assign such an instance of [ə] to one of the phonemes /a/ and /o/, it is necessary to consider morphological factors (such as which of the vowels occurs in other forms of the words, or which inflectional pattern is followed). In some cases even this may not provide an unambiguous answer. A description using the approach of underspecification would not attempt to assign [ə] to a specific phoneme in some or all of these cases, although it might be assigned to an archiphoneme, written something like |A|, which reflects the two neutralized phonemes in this position.

A somewhat different example is found in English, with the three nasal phonemes /m, n, ŋ/. In word-final position these all contrast, as shown by the minimal triplet sum/sʌm/, sun/sʌn/, sung/sʌŋ/. However, before a stop such as /p, t, k/ (provided there is no morpheme boundary between them), only one of the nasals is possible in any given position: /m/ before /p/, /n/ before /t/ or /d/, and /ŋ/ before /k/, as in limp, lint, link ( /lɪmp/, /lɪnt/, /lɪŋk/). The nasals are therefore not contrastive in these environments, and according to some theorists this makes it inappropriate to assign the nasal phones heard here to any one of the phonemes (even though, in this case, the phonetic evidence is unambiguous). Instead they may analyze these phones as belonging to a single archiphoneme, written something like |N|, and state the underlying representations of limp, lint, link to be |lɪNp|, |lɪNt|, |lɪNk|.

This latter type of analysis is often associated with Nikolai Trubetzkoy of the Prague school. Archiphonemes are often notated with a capital letter within pipes, as with the examples |A| and |N| given above. Other ways the second of these might be notated include |m-n-ŋ|, {m, n, ŋ}, or |n*|.

Another example from English, but this time involving complete phonetic convergence as in the Russian example, is the flapping of /t/ and /d/ in some American English (described above under Biuniqueness). Here the words betting and bedding might both be pronounced [ˈbɛɾɪŋ], and if a speaker applies such flapping consistently, it would be necessary to look for morphological evidence (the pronunciation of the related forms bet and bed, for example) in order to determine which phoneme the flap represents. As in the previous examples, some theorists would prefer not to make such a determination, and simply assign the flap in both cases to a single archiphoneme, written (for example) |D|.

A morphophoneme is a theoretical unit at a deeper level of abstraction than traditional phonemes, and is taken to be a unit from which morphemes are built up. A morphophoneme within a morpheme can be expressed in different ways in different allomorphs of that morpheme (according to morphophonological rules). For example, the English plural morpheme -s appearing in words such as cats and dogs can be considered to consist of a single morphophoneme, which might be written (for example) //z// or |z|, and which is pronounced as [s] after most voiceless consonants (as in cats) and [z] in most other cases (as in dogs).

A given language will use only a small subset of the many possible sounds that the human speech organs can produce, and (because of allophony) the number of distinct phonemes will generally be smaller than the number of identifiably different sounds. Different languages vary considerably in the number of phonemes they have in their systems (although apparent variation may sometimes result from the different approaches taken by the linguists doing the analysis). The total phonemic inventory in languages varies from as few as 11 in Rotokas and Pirahã to as many as 141 in !Xũ.[15]

The number of phonemically distinct vowels can be as low as two, as in Ubykh and Arrernte. At the other extreme, the Bantu language Ngwe has 14 vowel qualities, 12 of which may occur long or short, making 26 oral vowels, plus 6 nasalized vowels, long and short, making a total of 38 vowels; while !Xóõ achieves 31 pure vowels, not counting its additional variation by vowel length, by varying the phonation. As regards consonant phonemes, Puinave and the Papuan language Tauade each have just seven, and Rotokas has only six. !Xóõ, on the other hand, has somewhere around 77, and Ubykh 81. The English language uses a rather large set of 13 to 21 vowel phonemes, including diphthongs, although its 22 to 26 consonants are close to average.

The most common vowel system consists of the five vowels /i/, /e/, /a/, /o/, /u/. The most common consonants are /p/, /t/, /k/, /m/, /n/.[citation needed] Relatively few languages lack any of these consonants, although it does happen: for example, Arabic lacks /p/, standard Hawaiian lacks /t/, Mohawk and Tlingit lack /p/ and /m/, Hupa lacks both /p/ and a simple /k/, colloquial Samoan lacks /t/ and /n/, while Rotokas and Quileute lack /m/ and /n/.

During the development of phoneme theory in the mid-20th century phonologists were concerned not only with the procedures and principles involved in producing a phonemic analysis of the sounds of a given language, but also with the reality or uniqueness of the phonemic solution. Some writers took the position expressed by Kenneth Pike: "There is only one accurate phonemic analysis for a given set of data",[16] while others believed that different analyses, equally valid, could be made for the same data. Yuen Ren Chao (1934), in his article "The non-uniqueness of phonemic solutions of phonetic systems"[17] stated "given the sounds of a language, there are usually more than one possible way of reducing them to a set of phonemes, and these different systems or solutions are not simply correct or incorrect, but may be regarded only as being good or bad for various purposes". The linguist F.W. Householder referred to this argument within linguistics as "God's Truth vs. hocus-pocus".[18] Different analyses of the English vowel system may be used to illustrate this. The article English Phonology states that "English has a particularly large number of vowel phonemes" and that "there are 20 vowel phonemes in Received Pronunciation, 14–16 in General American and 20–21 in Australian English"; the present article (Phoneme#Numbers of phonemes in different languages) says that "the English language uses a rather large set of 13 to 21 vowel phonemes". Although these figures are often quoted as a scientific fact, they actually reflect just one of many possible analyses, and later in the English Phonology article an alternative analysis is suggested in which some diphthongs and long vowels may be interpreted as comprising a short vowel linked to either /j/ or /w/. The transcription system for British English (RP) devised by the phonetician Geoff Lindsey and used in the CUBE pronunciation dictionary also treats diphthongs as composed of a vowel plus /j/ or /w/.[19] The fullest exposition of this approach is found in Trager and Smith (1951), where all long vowels and diphthongs ("complex nuclei") are made up of a short vowel combined with either /j/, /w/ or /h/ (plus /r/ for rhotic accents), each thus comprising two phonemes: they wrote "The conclusion is inescapable that the complex nuclei consist each of two phonemes, one of the short vowels followed by one of three glides".[20] The transcription for the vowel normally transcribed /aɪ/ would instead be /aj/, /aʊ/ would be /aw/ and /ɑː/ would be /ah/. The consequence of this approach is that English could theoretically have only seven vowel phonemes, which might be symbolized /i/, /e/, /a/, /o/, /u/, /ʌ/ and /ə/, or even six if schwa were treated as an allophone of /ʌ/ or of other short vowels, a figure that would put English much closer to the average number of vowel phonemes in other languages.[21]

In the same period there was disagreement about the correct basis for a phonemic analysis. The Structuralist position was that the analysis should be made purely on the basis of the sound elements and their distribution, with no reference to extraneous factors such as grammar, morphology or the intuitions of the native speaker; this position is strongly associated with Leonard Bloomfield.[22]Zellig Harris claimed that it is possible to discover the phonemes of a language purely by examining the distribution of phonetic segments.[23] Referring to mentalistic definitions of the phoneme, Twaddell (1935) stated "Such a definition is invalid because (1) we have no right to guess about the linguistic workings of an inaccessible 'mind', and (2) we can secure no advantage from such guesses. The linguistic processes of the 'mind' as such are quite simply unobservable; and introspection about linguistic processes is notoriously a fire in a wooden stove."[24] This approach was opposed to that of Edward Sapir, who gave an important role to native speakers' intuitions about where a particular sound or groups of sounds fitted into a pattern. Using English [ŋ] as an example, Sapir argued that, despite the superficial appearance that this sound belongs to a group of nasal consonants, "no naive English-speaking person can be made to feel in his bones that it belongs to a single series with /m/ and /n/. ... It still feels like ŋg".[25] The theory of generative phonology which emerged in the 1960s explicitly rejected the Structuralist approach to phonology and favoured the mentalistic or cognitive view of Sapir.[26][27]

Phonemes are considered to be the basis for alphabetic writing systems. In such systems the written symbols (graphemes) represent, in principle, the phonemes of the language being written. This is most obviously the case when the alphabet was invented with a particular language in mind; for example, the Latin alphabet was devised for Classical Latin, and therefore the Latin of that period enjoyed a near one-to-one correspondence between phonemes and graphemes in most cases, though the devisers of the alphabet chose not to represent the phonemic effect of vowel length. However, because changes in the spoken language are often not accompanied by changes in the established orthography (as well as other reasons, including dialect differences, the effects of morphophonology on orthography, and the use of foreign spellings for some loanwords), the correspondence between spelling and pronunciation in a given language may be highly distorted; this is the case with English, for example.

The correspondence between symbols and phonemes in alphabetic writing systems is not necessarily a one-to-one correspondence. A phoneme might be represented by a combination of two or more letters (digraph, trigraph, etc.), like <sh> in English or <sch> in German (both representing phonemes /ʃ/). Also a single letter may represent two phonemes, as in English <x> representing /gz/ or /ks/. There may also exist spelling/pronunciation rules (such as those for the pronunciation of <c> in Italian) that further complicate the correspondence of letters to phonemes, although they need not affect the ability to predict the pronunciation from the spelling and vice versa, provided the rules are known.

In sign languages, the basic elements of gesture and location were formerly called cheremes or cheiremes but they are now generally referred to as phonemes, as with oral languages.

Sign language phonemes are combinations of articulation bundles in ASL. These bundles may be classified as tab (elements of location, from Latin tabula), dez (the hand shape, from designator), sig (the motion, from signation), and with some researchers, ori (orientation). Facial expression and mouthing are also considered articulation bundles. Just as with spoken languages, when these bundles are combined, they create phonemes.

Stokoe notation is no longer used by researchers to denote the phonemes of sign languages; William Stokoe's research, while still considered seminal, has been found to not describe American Sign Language sufficiently[28] and cannot be used interchangeably with other signed languages. Originally developed for American Sign Language, it has also been applied to British Sign Language by Kyle and Woll, and to Australian Aboriginal sign languages by Adam Kendon. Other sign notations, such as the Hamburg Notation System and SignWriting, are phonetic scripts capable of writing any sign language. Stokoe's work has been succeeded and improved upon by researcher Scott Liddell in his book Grammar, Gesture, and Meaning in American Sign Language,[29] and both Stokoe and Liddell's work have been included in Linguistics of American Sign Language, 5th Edition.[30]

1.
PhoneME
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A phoneme is one of the units of sound that distinguish one word from another in a particular language. The difference in meaning between the English words kill and kiss is a result of the exchange of the phoneme /l/ for the phoneme /s/, two words that differ in meaning through a contrast of a single phoneme form a minimal pair. In linguistics, phonemes are written between slashes like this, /p/, whereas when it is desired to show the exact pronunciation of any sound, linguists use square brackets. Within linguistics there are differing views as to exactly what phonemes are, however, a phoneme is generally regarded as an abstraction of a set of speech sounds which are perceived as equivalent to each other in a given language. For example, in English, the k sounds in the kit and skill are not identical. Different speech sounds that are realizations of the same phoneme are known as allophones, phonemes are conventionally placed between slashes in transcription, whereas speech sounds are placed between square brackets. Thus /pʊʃ/ represents a sequence of three phonemes /p/, /ʊ/, /ʃ/, while represents the sequence of sounds. The symbols used for particular phonemes are often taken from the International Phonetic Alphabet, however, descriptions of particular languages may use different conventional symbols to represent the phonemes of those languages. A phoneme is a sound or a group of different sounds perceived to have the function by speakers of the language or dialect in question. An example is the English phoneme /k/, which occurs in such as cat, kit, scat. Although most native speakers do not notice this, in most English dialects the c/k sounds in words are not identical, in kit the sound is aspirated. The words therefore contain different speech sounds, or phones, transcribed for the aspirated form, the above shows that in English, and are allophones of a single phoneme /k/. For example, in Icelandic, is the first sound of kátur meaning cheerful, Icelandic therefore has two separate phonemes /kʰ/ and /k/. A pair of words like kátur and gátur that differ only in one phone is called a pair for the two alternative phones in question. The existence of pairs is a common test to decide whether two phones represent different phonemes or are allophones of the same phoneme. In other languages, though, including Korean, even though both sounds and occur, no minimal pair exists. The lack of minimal pairs distinguishing and in Korean provides evidence that in this language they are allophones of a single phoneme /t/, the word /tata/ is pronounced, for example. Signed languages, such as American Sign Language also have minimal pairs, Sign language minimal pairs refer to one of the signs parameters, handshape, movement, location, palm orientation, and non-manual signal/marker

2.
Linguistics
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Linguistics is the scientific study of language, and involves an analysis of language form, language meaning, and language in context. Linguists traditionally analyse human language by observing an interplay between sound and meaning, phonetics is the study of speech and non-speech sounds, and delves into their acoustic and articulatory properties. While the study of semantics typically concerns itself with truth conditions, Grammar is a system of rules which governs the production and use of utterances in a given language. These rules apply to sound as well as meaning, and include componential sub-sets of rules, such as those pertaining to phonology, morphology, modern theories that deal with the principles of grammar are largely based within Noam Chomskys ideological school of generative grammar. In the early 20th century, Ferdinand de Saussure distinguished between the notions of langue and parole in his formulation of structural linguistics. According to him, parole is the utterance of speech, whereas langue refers to an abstract phenomenon that theoretically defines the principles. This distinction resembles the one made by Noam Chomsky between competence and performance in his theory of transformative or generative grammar. According to Chomsky, competence is an innate capacity and potential for language, while performance is the specific way in which it is used by individuals, groups. The study of parole is the domain of sociolinguistics, the sub-discipline that comprises the study of a system of linguistic facets within a certain speech community. Discourse analysis further examines the structure of texts and conversations emerging out of a speech communitys usage of language, Stylistics also involves the study of written, signed, or spoken discourse through varying speech communities, genres, and editorial or narrative formats in the mass media. In the 1960s, Jacques Derrida, for instance, further distinguished between speech and writing, by proposing that language be studied as a linguistic medium of communication in itself. Palaeography is therefore the discipline that studies the evolution of scripts in language. Linguistics also deals with the social, cultural, historical and political factors that influence language, through which linguistic, research on language through the sub-branches of historical and evolutionary linguistics also focus on how languages change and grow, particularly over an extended period of time. Language documentation combines anthropological inquiry with linguistic inquiry, in order to describe languages, lexicography involves the documentation of words that form a vocabulary. Such a documentation of a vocabulary from a particular language is usually compiled in a dictionary. Computational linguistics is concerned with the statistical or rule-based modeling of natural language from a computational perspective, specific knowledge of language is applied by speakers during the act of translation and interpretation, as well as in language education – the teaching of a second or foreign language. Policy makers work with governments to implement new plans in education, related areas of study also includes the disciplines of semiotics, literary criticism, translation, and speech-language pathology. Before the 20th century, the philology, first attested in 1716, was commonly used to refer to the science of language

3.
Abstraction
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An abstraction is the product of this process — a concept that acts as a super-categorical noun for all subordinate concepts, and connects any related concepts as a group, field, or category. Conceptual abstractions may be formed by filtering the information content of a concept or an observable phenomenon, in a type–token distinction, a type is more abstract than its tokens. Abstraction in its use is a material process, discussed in the themes below. Its development is likely to have been connected with the development of human language. Abstraction involves induction of ideas or the synthesis of particular facts into one theory about something. It is the opposite of specification, which is the analysis or breaking-down of an idea or abstraction into concrete facts. Thales believed that everything in the universe comes from one main substance and he deduced or specified from a general idea, everything is water, to the specific forms of water such as ice, snow, fog, and rivers. Modern scientists can use the opposite approach of abstraction, or going from particular facts collected into one general idea. This conceptual scheme emphasizes the inherent equality of both constituent and abstract data, thus avoiding problems arising from the distinction between abstract and concrete, in this sense the process of abstraction entails the identification of similarities between objects, and the process of associating these objects with an abstraction. For example, picture 1 below illustrates the concrete relationship Cat sits on Mat, for example, graph 1 below expresses the abstraction agent sits on location. This conceptual scheme entails no specific hierarchical taxonomy, only a progressive exclusion of detail, things that do not exist at any particular place and time are often considered abstract. By contrast, instances, or members, of such a thing might exist in many different places and times. Those abstract things are said to be multiply instantiated, in the sense of picture 1, picture 2. It is not sufficient, however, to abstract ideas as those that can be instantiated. Although the concepts cat and telephone are abstractions, they are not abstract in the sense of the objects in graph 1 below, perhaps confusingly, some philosophies refer to tropes as abstract particulars — e. g. the particular redness of a particular apple is an abstract particular. This is similar to qualia and sumbebekos, karl Marxs writing on the commodity abstraction recognizes a parallel process. The state as both concept and material practice exemplifies the two sides of this process of abstraction, conceptually, the current concept of the state is an abstraction from the much more concrete early-modern use as the standing or status of the prince, his visible estates. At the same time, materially, the practice of statehood is now constitutively and materially more abstract than at the time when princes ruled as the embodiment of extended power and that difference accounts for the ontological usefulness of the word abstract

4.
Equivalence class
–
In mathematics, when the elements of some set S have a notion of equivalence defined on them, then one may naturally split the set S into equivalence classes. These equivalence classes are constructed so that elements a and b belong to the equivalence class if. Formally, given a set S and an equivalence relation ~ on S and it may be proven from the defining properties of equivalence relations that the equivalence classes form a partition of S. This partition – the set of equivalence classes – is sometimes called the quotient set or the quotient space of S by ~ and is denoted by S / ~. Examples include quotient spaces in linear algebra, quotient spaces in topology, quotient groups, homogeneous spaces, quotient rings, quotient monoids, and quotient categories. If X is the set of all cars, and ~ is the relation has the same color as. X/~ could be identified with the set of all car colors. Let X be the set of all rectangles in a plane, for each positive real number A there will be an equivalence class of all the rectangles that have area A. Consider the modulo 2 equivalence relation on the set Z of integers, x ~ y if and this relation gives rise to exactly two equivalence classes, one class consisting of all even numbers, and the other consisting of all odd numbers. Under this relation, and all represent the element of Z/~. Let X be the set of ordered pairs of integers with b not zero, the same construction can be generalized to the field of fractions of any integral domain. In this situation, each equivalence class determines a point at infinity, the equivalence class of an element a is denoted and is defined as the set = of elements that are related to a by ~. An alternative notation R can be used to denote the class of the element a. This is said to be the R-equivalence class of a, the set of all equivalence classes in X with respect to an equivalence relation R is denoted as X/R and called X modulo R. The surjective map x ↦ from X onto X/R, which each element to its equivalence class, is called the canonical surjection or the canonical projection map. When an element is chosen in each class, this defines an injective map called a section. If this section is denoted by s, one has = c for every equivalence class c, the element s is called a representative of c. Any element of a class may be chosen as a representative of the class, sometimes, there is a section that is more natural than the other ones

5.
Bracket
–
A bracket is a tall punctuation mark typically used in matched pairs within text, to set apart or interject other text. The matched pair may be described as opening and closing, or left, forms include round, square, curly, and angle brackets, and various other pairs of symbols. Chevrons were the earliest type of bracket to appear in written English, desiderius Erasmus coined the term lunula to refer to the rounded parentheses, recalling the shape of the crescent moon. Some of the names are regional or contextual. Sometimes referred to as angle brackets, in cases as HTML markup. Occasionally known as broken brackets or brokets, ⸤ ⸥, ｢ ｣ – corner brackets ⟦ ⟧ – double square brackets, white square brackets Guillemets, ‹ › and « », are sometimes referred to as chevrons or angle brackets. The characters ‹ › and « », known as guillemets or angular quote brackets, are actually quotation mark glyphs used in several European languages, which one of each pair is the opening quote mark and which is the closing quote varies between languages. In English, typographers generally prefer to not set brackets in italics, however, in other languages like German, if brackets enclose text in italics, they are usually set in italics too. Parentheses /pəˈrɛnθᵻsiːz/ contain material that serves to clarify or is aside from the main point, a milder effect may be obtained by using a pair of commas as the delimiter, though if the sentence contains commas for other purposes, visual confusion may result. In American usage, parentheses are considered separate from other brackets. Parentheses may be used in writing to add supplementary information. They can also indicate shorthand for either singular or plural for nouns and it can also be used for gender neutral language, especially in languages with grammatical gender, e. g. he agreed with his physician. Parenthetical phrases have been used extensively in informal writing and stream of consciousness literature, examples include the southern American author William Faulkner as well as poet E. E. Cummings. Parentheses have historically been used where the dash is used in alternatives, such as parenthesis) is used to indicate an interval from a to c that is inclusive of a. That is, [5, 12) would be the set of all numbers between 5 and 12, including 5 but not 12. The numbers may come as close as they like to 12, including 11.999 and so forth, in some European countries, the notation [5, 12[ is also used for this. The endpoint adjoining the bracket is known as closed, whereas the endpoint adjoining the parenthesis is known as open, if both types of brackets are the same, the entire interval may be referred to as closed or open as appropriate. Whenever +∞ or −∞ is used as an endpoint, it is considered open

6.
Allophone
–
In phonology, an allophone is one of a set of multiple possible spoken sounds or signs used to pronounce a single phoneme in a particular language. For example, and are allophones for the phoneme /p/ in the English language, the specific allophone selected in a given situation is often predictable from the phonetic context, but sometimes allophones occur in free variation. Replacing a sound by another allophone of the same phoneme will usually not change the meaning of a word, the term allophone was coined by Benjamin Lee Whorf in the 1940s. In doing so, he placed a cornerstone in consolidating early phoneme theory, the term was popularized by G. L. Trager and Bernard Bloch in a 1941 paper on English phonology and went on to become part of standard usage within the American structuralist tradition. Every time a users speech is vocalized for a phoneme, it will be slightly different from other utterances. This has led to debate over how real, and how universal. Only some of the variation is significant to speakers, when a specific allophone must be selected in a given context, the allophones are said to be complementary. In the case of complementary allophones, each allophone is used in a specific phonetic context, in other cases, the speaker is able to select freely from free variant allophones, based on personal habit or preference. Another example of an allophone is assimilation, wherein a phoneme is to more like the other phoneme. A tonic allophone is sometimes called an allotone, for example in the tone of Mandarin. Aspiration – strong explosion of breath, in English a voiceless plosive is aspirated whenever it stands as the consonant at the beginning of the stressed syllable or of the first, stressed or unstressed, syllable in a word. For example, as in pin and as in spin are allophones for the phoneme /p/ because they cannot distinguish words, English speakers treat them as the same sound, but they are different, the first is aspirated and the second is unaspirated. Many languages treat these two phones differently, see Aspirated consonant, section Usage patterns, nasal plosion – In English a plosive has nasal plosion when it is followed by a nasal, inside a word or across word boundary. Partial devoicing of sonorants – In English sonorants are partially devoiced when they follow a voiceless sound within the same syllable, complete devoicing of sonorants – In English a sonorant is completely devoiced when it follows an aspirated plosive. Partial devoicing of obstruents – In English, an obstruent is partially devoiced next to a pause or next to a voiceless sound. Retraction – in English /t, d, n, l/ are retracted before /r/, because the choice of allophone is seldom under conscious control, people may not realize they exist. The difference can also be felt by holding the hand in front of the lips. For a Mandarin speaker, to whom /t/ and /tʰ/ are separate phonemes, Allophones of English /l/ may be noticed if the light of leaf is contrasted with the dark of feel

7.
Square bracket
–
A bracket is a tall punctuation mark typically used in matched pairs within text, to set apart or interject other text. The matched pair may be described as opening and closing, or left, forms include round, square, curly, and angle brackets, and various other pairs of symbols. Chevrons were the earliest type of bracket to appear in written English, desiderius Erasmus coined the term lunula to refer to the rounded parentheses, recalling the shape of the crescent moon. Some of the names are regional or contextual. Sometimes referred to as angle brackets, in cases as HTML markup. Occasionally known as broken brackets or brokets, ⸤ ⸥, ｢ ｣ – corner brackets ⟦ ⟧ – double square brackets, white square brackets Guillemets, ‹ › and « », are sometimes referred to as chevrons or angle brackets. The characters ‹ › and « », known as guillemets or angular quote brackets, are actually quotation mark glyphs used in several European languages, which one of each pair is the opening quote mark and which is the closing quote varies between languages. In English, typographers generally prefer to not set brackets in italics, however, in other languages like German, if brackets enclose text in italics, they are usually set in italics too. Parentheses /pəˈrɛnθᵻsiːz/ contain material that serves to clarify or is aside from the main point, a milder effect may be obtained by using a pair of commas as the delimiter, though if the sentence contains commas for other purposes, visual confusion may result. In American usage, parentheses are considered separate from other brackets. Parentheses may be used in writing to add supplementary information. They can also indicate shorthand for either singular or plural for nouns and it can also be used for gender neutral language, especially in languages with grammatical gender, e. g. he agreed with his physician. Parenthetical phrases have been used extensively in informal writing and stream of consciousness literature, examples include the southern American author William Faulkner as well as poet E. E. Cummings. Parentheses have historically been used where the dash is used in alternatives, such as parenthesis) is used to indicate an interval from a to c that is inclusive of a. That is, [5, 12) would be the set of all numbers between 5 and 12, including 5 but not 12. The numbers may come as close as they like to 12, including 11.999 and so forth, in some European countries, the notation [5, 12[ is also used for this. The endpoint adjoining the bracket is known as closed, whereas the endpoint adjoining the parenthesis is known as open, if both types of brackets are the same, the entire interval may be referred to as closed or open as appropriate. Whenever +∞ or −∞ is used as an endpoint, it is considered open

8.
Angle bracket
–
A bracket is a tall punctuation mark typically used in matched pairs within text, to set apart or interject other text. The matched pair may be described as opening and closing, or left, forms include round, square, curly, and angle brackets, and various other pairs of symbols. Chevrons were the earliest type of bracket to appear in written English, desiderius Erasmus coined the term lunula to refer to the rounded parentheses, recalling the shape of the crescent moon. Some of the names are regional or contextual. Sometimes referred to as angle brackets, in cases as HTML markup. Occasionally known as broken brackets or brokets, ⸤ ⸥, ｢ ｣ – corner brackets ⟦ ⟧ – double square brackets, white square brackets Guillemets, ‹ › and « », are sometimes referred to as chevrons or angle brackets. The characters ‹ › and « », known as guillemets or angular quote brackets, are actually quotation mark glyphs used in several European languages, which one of each pair is the opening quote mark and which is the closing quote varies between languages. In English, typographers generally prefer to not set brackets in italics, however, in other languages like German, if brackets enclose text in italics, they are usually set in italics too. Parentheses /pəˈrɛnθᵻsiːz/ contain material that serves to clarify or is aside from the main point, a milder effect may be obtained by using a pair of commas as the delimiter, though if the sentence contains commas for other purposes, visual confusion may result. In American usage, parentheses are considered separate from other brackets. Parentheses may be used in writing to add supplementary information. They can also indicate shorthand for either singular or plural for nouns and it can also be used for gender neutral language, especially in languages with grammatical gender, e. g. he agreed with his physician. Parenthetical phrases have been used extensively in informal writing and stream of consciousness literature, examples include the southern American author William Faulkner as well as poet E. E. Cummings. Parentheses have historically been used where the dash is used in alternatives, such as parenthesis) is used to indicate an interval from a to c that is inclusive of a. That is, [5, 12) would be the set of all numbers between 5 and 12, including 5 but not 12. The numbers may come as close as they like to 12, including 11.999 and so forth, in some European countries, the notation [5, 12[ is also used for this. The endpoint adjoining the bracket is known as closed, whereas the endpoint adjoining the parenthesis is known as open, if both types of brackets are the same, the entire interval may be referred to as closed or open as appropriate. Whenever +∞ or −∞ is used as an endpoint, it is considered open

9.
Grapheme
–
In linguistics, a grapheme is the smallest unit of a writing system of any given language. An individual grapheme may or may not carry meaning by itself, graphemes include alphabetic letters, typographic ligatures, Chinese characters, numerical digits, punctuation marks, and other individual symbols. The word grapheme, coined in analogy with phoneme, is derived from Greek γράφω, meaning write, the study of graphemes is called graphemics. The concept of graphemes is an one and similar to the notion in computing of a character. By comparison, a shape that represents any particular grapheme in a specific typeface is called a glyph. For example, the corresponding to the abstract concept of the Arabic numeral one has two distinct glyphs in the fonts Times New Roman and Helvetica. Graphemes are often notated within angle brackets, as ⟨a⟩, ⟨B⟩ and this is analogous to the slash notation used for phonemes, and the square bracket notation used for phonetic transcriptions. Hence a grapheme can be regarded as an abstraction of a collection of glyphs that are all semantically equivalent, for example, in written English, there are many different physical representations of the lowercase letter a, such as a, ɑ, etc. But because the substitution of any of these for any other cannot change the meaning of a word, they are considered to be allographs of the same grapheme, italic and bold face are also allographic. There is some disagreement as to whether capital and lower-case letters are allographs or distinct graphemes, some linguists consider digraphs like the ⟨sh⟩ in ship to be distinct graphemes, but these are generally analyzed as sequences of graphemes. Ligatures, however, such as ⟨æ⟩, are distinct graphemes, as are letters with distinctive diacritics. For a full discussion of the different types, see Writing system § Functional classification, there are additional graphemic components used in writing, such as punctuation marks, mathematical symbols, word dividers such as the space, and other typographic symbols. As mentioned in the section, in languages that use alphabetic writing systems. In practice, however, the orthographies of such languages entail at least an amount of deviation from the ideal of exact grapheme–phoneme correspondence. A phoneme may be represented by a multigraph, as the digraph sh represents a sound in English. Multigraphs representing a single phoneme are normally treated as combinations of separate letters, for more examples, see Alphabetical order § Language-specific conventions. Conversion of scripts Character Grapheme–color synesthesia Grapheme–color ideasthesia Sign

10.
International Phonetic Alphabet
–
The International Phonetic Alphabet is an alphabetic system of phonetic notation based primarily on the Latin alphabet. It was devised by the International Phonetic Association as a representation of the sounds of spoken language. The IPA is used by lexicographers, foreign students and teachers, linguists, speech-language pathologists, singers, actors, constructed language creators. The IPA is designed to represent only those qualities of speech that are part of language, phones, phonemes, intonation. IPA symbols are composed of one or more elements of two types, letters and diacritics. For example, the sound of the English letter ⟨t⟩ may be transcribed in IPA with a letter, or with a letter plus diacritics. Often, slashes are used to signal broad or phonemic transcription, thus, /t/ is less specific than, occasionally letters or diacritics are added, removed, or modified by the International Phonetic Association. As of the most recent change in 2005, there are 107 letters,52 diacritics and these are shown in the current IPA chart, posted below in this article and at the website of the IPA. In 1886, a group of French and British language teachers, led by the French linguist Paul Passy, for example, the sound was originally represented with the letter ⟨c⟩ in English, but with the digraph ⟨ch⟩ in French. However, in 1888, the alphabet was revised so as to be uniform across languages, the idea of making the IPA was first suggested by Otto Jespersen in a letter to Paul Passy. It was developed by Alexander John Ellis, Henry Sweet, Daniel Jones, since its creation, the IPA has undergone a number of revisions. After major revisions and expansions in 1900 and 1932, the IPA remained unchanged until the International Phonetic Association Kiel Convention in 1989, a minor revision took place in 1993 with the addition of four letters for mid central vowels and the removal of letters for voiceless implosives. The alphabet was last revised in May 2005 with the addition of a letter for a labiodental flap, apart from the addition and removal of symbols, changes to the IPA have consisted largely in renaming symbols and categories and in modifying typefaces. Extensions to the International Phonetic Alphabet for speech pathology were created in 1990, the general principle of the IPA is to provide one letter for each distinctive sound, although this practice is not followed if the sound itself is complex. There are no letters that have context-dependent sound values, as do hard, finally, the IPA does not usually have separate letters for two sounds if no known language makes a distinction between them, a property known as selectiveness. These are organized into a chart, the chart displayed here is the chart as posted at the website of the IPA. The letters chosen for the IPA are meant to harmonize with the Latin alphabet, for this reason, most letters are either Latin or Greek, or modifications thereof. Some letters are neither, for example, the letter denoting the glottal stop, ⟨ʔ⟩, has the form of a question mark

11.
X-SAMPA
–
The Extended Speech Assessment Methods Phonetic Alphabet is a variant of SAMPA developed in 1995 by John C. Wells, professor of phonetics at the University of London and it is designed to unify the individual language SAMPA alphabets, and extend SAMPA to cover the entire range of characters in the International Phonetic Alphabet. The result is a SAMPA-inspired remapping of the IPA into 7-bit ASCII, SAMPA was devised as a hack to work around the inability of text encodings to represent IPA symbols. Later, as Unicode support for IPA symbols became more widespread, however, X-SAMPA is still useful as the basis for an input method for true IPA. The IPA symbols that are ordinary lower-case letters have the value in X-SAMPA as they do in the IPA. X-SAMPA uses backslashes as modifying suffixes to create new symbols, for example, O is a distinct sound from O\, to which it bears no relation. Such use of the character can be a problem, since many programs interpret it as an escape character for the character following it. For example, you use such X-SAMPA symbols in EMU. X-SAMPA diacritics follow the symbols they modify, except for ~ for nasalization, = for syllabicity, and for retroflexion and rhotacization, diacritics are joined to the character with the underscore character _. The underscore character is used to encode the IPA tiebar. The numbers _1 to _6 are reserved diacritics as shorthand for language-specific tone numbers, asterisks mark sounds that do not have X-SAMPA symbols. Daggers mark IPA symbols that have recently added to Unicode. Since April 2008, the latter is the case of the labiodental flap, a dedicated symbol for the labiodental flap does not yet exist in X-SAMPA. International Phonetic Alphabet International Phonetic Alphabet for English Kirshenbaum and WorldBet, list of phonetics topics SAMPA, a language-specific predecessor of X-SAMPA. SAMPA chart for English Computer-coding the IPA, A proposed extension of SAMPA Translate English texts into IPA phonetics with PhoTransEdit and this free software tool allows to export transcriptions to X-SAMPA. Online converter between IPA and X-Sampa Web-based translator for X-SAMPA documents, produces Unicode text, XML text, PostScript, PDF, or LaTeX TIPA. Z-SAMPA, an extension of X-SAMPA sometimes used for conlangs Web-based X-SAMPA to IPA Converter

12.
Kirshenbaum
–
Kirshenbaum, sometimes called ASCII-IPA or erkIPA, is a system used to represent the International Phonetic Alphabet in ASCII. This way it allows typewriting IPA-symbols by regular keyboard and it was developed for Usenet, notably the newsgroups sci. lang and alt. usage. english. It is named after Evan Kirshenbaum, who led the collaboration that created it, the system uses almost all lower-case letters to represent the directly corresponding IPA character, but unlike X-SAMPA, has the notable exception of the letter r. Examples where the two systems have a different mapping between characters and sounds are, This chart is based on information provided in the Kirshenbaum specification and it may also be helpful to compare it to the SAMPA chart or X-SAMPA chart. Stress is indicated by for primary stress, and, for secondary stress, the Kirshenbaum started developing in August 1992 through a usenet group, after being fed up with describing the sound of words by using other words. It should be usable for both phonemic and narrow phonetic transcription and it should be possible to represent all symbols and diacritics in the IPA. It should be possible to translate from the representation to a character set which includes IPA. The reverse would also be nice, the developers decided to use the existing IPA alphabet, mapping each segment to a single keyboard character, and adding extra ASCII characters optionally for IPA diacritics. An early, different set in ASCII was derived from the guide in Merriam-Websters New Collegiate Dictionary. Kirshenbaum specification Tutorial and guide with sound samples History

13.
ASCII
–
ASCII, abbreviated from American Standard Code for Information Interchange, is a character encoding standard. ASCII codes represent text in computers, telecommunications equipment, and other devices, most modern character-encoding schemes are based on ASCII, although they support many additional characters. ASCII was developed from telegraph code and its first commercial use was as a seven-bit teleprinter code promoted by Bell data services. Work on the ASCII standard began on October 6,1960, the first edition of the standard was published in 1963, underwent a major revision during 1967, and experienced its most recent update during 1986. Compared to earlier telegraph codes, the proposed Bell code and ASCII were both ordered for more convenient sorting of lists, and added features for other than teleprinters. Originally based on the English alphabet, ASCII encodes 128 specified characters into seven-bit integers as shown by the ASCII chart above. The characters encoded are numbers 0 to 9, lowercase letters a to z, uppercase letters A to Z, basic punctuation symbols, control codes that originated with Teletype machines, for example, lowercase j would become binary 1101010 and decimal 106. ASCII includes definitions for 128 characters,33 are non-printing control characters that affect how text and space are processed and 95 printable characters, of these, the IANA encourages use of the name US-ASCII for Internet uses of ASCII. The ASA became the United States of America Standards Institute and ultimately the American National Standards Institute, there was some debate at the time whether there should be more control characters rather than the lowercase alphabet. The X3.2.4 task group voted its approval for the change to ASCII at its May 1963 meeting, the X3 committee made other changes, including other new characters, renaming some control characters and moving or removing others. ASCII was subsequently updated as USAS X3. 4-1967, then USAS X3. 4-1968, ANSI X3. 4-1977 and they proposed a 9-track standard for magnetic tape, and attempted to deal with some punched card formats. The X3.2 subcommittee designed ASCII based on the earlier teleprinter encoding systems, like other character encodings, ASCII specifies a correspondence between digital bit patterns and character symbols. This allows digital devices to communicate each other and to process, store. Before ASCII was developed, the encodings in use included 26 alphabetic characters,10 numerical digits, ITA2 were in turn based on the 5-bit telegraph code Émile Baudot invented in 1870 and patented in 1874. The committee debated the possibility of a function, which would allow more than 64 codes to be represented by a six-bit code. In a shifted code, some character codes determine choices between options for the character codes. It allows compact encoding, but is reliable for data transmission. The standards committee decided against shifting, and so ASCII required at least a seven-bit code, the committee considered an eight-bit code, since eight bits would allow two four-bit patterns to efficiently encode two digits with binary-coded decimal

14.
English language
–
English /ˈɪŋɡlɪʃ/ is a West Germanic language that was first spoken in early medieval England and is now the global lingua franca. Named after the Angles, one of the Germanic tribes that migrated to England, English is either the official language or one of the official languages in almost 60 sovereign states. It is the third most common language in the world, after Mandarin. It is the most widely learned second language and a language of the United Nations, of the European Union. It is the most widely spoken Germanic language, accounting for at least 70% of speakers of this Indo-European branch, English has developed over the course of more than 1,400 years. The earliest forms of English, a set of Anglo-Frisian dialects brought to Great Britain by Anglo-Saxon settlers in the century, are called Old English. Middle English began in the late 11th century with the Norman conquest of England, Early Modern English began in the late 15th century with the introduction of the printing press to London and the King James Bible, and the start of the Great Vowel Shift. Through the worldwide influence of the British Empire, modern English spread around the world from the 17th to mid-20th centuries, English is an Indo-European language, and belongs to the West Germanic group of the Germanic languages. Most closely related to English are the Frisian languages, and English, Old Saxon and its descendent Low German languages are also closely related, and sometimes Low German, English, and Frisian are grouped together as the Ingvaeonic or North Sea Germanic languages. Modern English descends from Middle English, which in turn descends from Old English, particular dialects of Old and Middle English also developed into a number of other English languages, including Scots and the extinct Fingallian and Forth and Bargy dialects of Ireland. English is classified as a Germanic language because it shares new language features with other Germanic languages such as Dutch, German and these shared innovations show that the languages have descended from a single common ancestor, which linguists call Proto-Germanic. Through Grimms law, the word for foot begins with /f/ in Germanic languages, English is classified as an Anglo-Frisian language because Frisian and English share other features, such as the palatalisation of consonants that were velar consonants in Proto-Germanic. The earliest form of English is called Old English or Anglo-Saxon, in the fifth century, the Anglo-Saxons settled Britain and the Romans withdrew from Britain. England and English are named after the Angles, Old English was divided into four dialects, the Anglian dialects, Mercian and Northumbrian, and the Saxon dialects, Kentish and West Saxon. Through the educational reforms of King Alfred in the century and the influence of the kingdom of Wessex. The epic poem Beowulf is written in West Saxon, and the earliest English poem, Modern English developed mainly from Mercian, but the Scots language developed from Northumbrian. A few short inscriptions from the period of Old English were written using a runic script. By the sixth century, a Latin alphabet was adopted, written with half-uncial letterforms and it included the runic letters wynn ⟨ƿ⟩ and thorn ⟨þ⟩, and the modified Latin letters eth ⟨ð⟩, and ash ⟨æ⟩

15.
Allophones
–
In phonology, an allophone is one of a set of multiple possible spoken sounds or signs used to pronounce a single phoneme in a particular language. For example, and are allophones for the phoneme /p/ in the English language, the specific allophone selected in a given situation is often predictable from the phonetic context, but sometimes allophones occur in free variation. Replacing a sound by another allophone of the same phoneme will usually not change the meaning of a word, the term allophone was coined by Benjamin Lee Whorf in the 1940s. In doing so, he placed a cornerstone in consolidating early phoneme theory, the term was popularized by G. L. Trager and Bernard Bloch in a 1941 paper on English phonology and went on to become part of standard usage within the American structuralist tradition. Every time a users speech is vocalized for a phoneme, it will be slightly different from other utterances. This has led to debate over how real, and how universal. Only some of the variation is significant to speakers, when a specific allophone must be selected in a given context, the allophones are said to be complementary. In the case of complementary allophones, each allophone is used in a specific phonetic context, in other cases, the speaker is able to select freely from free variant allophones, based on personal habit or preference. Another example of an allophone is assimilation, wherein a phoneme is to more like the other phoneme. A tonic allophone is sometimes called an allotone, for example in the tone of Mandarin. Aspiration – strong explosion of breath, in English a voiceless plosive is aspirated whenever it stands as the consonant at the beginning of the stressed syllable or of the first, stressed or unstressed, syllable in a word. For example, as in pin and as in spin are allophones for the phoneme /p/ because they cannot distinguish words, English speakers treat them as the same sound, but they are different, the first is aspirated and the second is unaspirated. Many languages treat these two phones differently, see Aspirated consonant, section Usage patterns, nasal plosion – In English a plosive has nasal plosion when it is followed by a nasal, inside a word or across word boundary. Partial devoicing of sonorants – In English sonorants are partially devoiced when they follow a voiceless sound within the same syllable, complete devoicing of sonorants – In English a sonorant is completely devoiced when it follows an aspirated plosive. Partial devoicing of obstruents – In English, an obstruent is partially devoiced next to a pause or next to a voiceless sound. Retraction – in English /t, d, n, l/ are retracted before /r/, because the choice of allophone is seldom under conscious control, people may not realize they exist. The difference can also be felt by holding the hand in front of the lips. For a Mandarin speaker, to whom /t/ and /tʰ/ are separate phonemes, Allophones of English /l/ may be noticed if the light of leaf is contrasted with the dark of feel

16.
Icelandic language
–
Icelandic /aɪsˈlændɪk/ is a North Germanic language, the language of Iceland. It is an Indo-European language belonging to the North Germanic or Nordic branch of the Germanic languages, historically, it was the westernmost of the Indo-European languages prior to the colonisation of the Americas. Icelandic, Faroese, Norn, and Western Norwegian formerly constituted West Nordic, Danish, Eastern Norwegian, modern Norwegian Bokmål is influenced by both groups, leading the Nordic languages to be divided into mainland Scandinavian languages and Insular Nordic. Most Western European languages have reduced levels of inflection, particularly noun declension. In contrast, Icelandic retains a four-case synthetic grammar comparable to, Icelandic is distinguished by a wide assortment of irregular declensions. Icelandic also has many instances of oblique cases without any governing word, for example, many of the various Latin ablatives have a corresponding Icelandic dative. The vast majority of Icelandic speakers—about 320, 000—live in Iceland, more than 8,000 Icelandic speakers live in Denmark, of whom approximately 3,000 are students. The language is spoken by some 5,000 people in the United States. Notably in the province of Manitoba, while 97% of the population of Iceland consider Icelandic their mother tongue, the language is in decline in some communities outside Iceland, particularly in Canada. Icelandic speakers outside Iceland represent recent emigration in almost all cases except Gimli, Manitoba, the state-funded Árni Magnússon Institute for Icelandic Studies serves as a centre for preserving the medieval Icelandic manuscripts and studying the language and its literature. Since 1995, on 16 November each year, the birthday of 19th-century poet Jónas Hallgrímsson is celebrated as Icelandic Language Day, the oldest preserved texts in Icelandic were written around 1100 AD. Much of the texts are based on poetry and laws traditionally preserved orally, the most famous of the texts, which were written in Iceland from the 12th century onward, are the Icelandic Sagas. They comprise the historical works and the eddaic poems, the language of the sagas is Old Icelandic, a western dialect of Old Norse. Danish rule of Iceland from 1380 to 1918 had little effect on the evolution of Icelandic, though more archaic than the other living Germanic languages, Icelandic changed markedly in pronunciation from the 12th to the 16th century, especially in vowels. The modern Icelandic alphabet has developed from an established in the 19th century. The later Rasmus Rask standard was a re-creation of the old treatise, with changes to fit concurrent Germanic conventions. Various archaic features, as the letter ð, had not been used much in later centuries, rasks standard constituted a major change in practice. Later 20th-century changes include the use of é instead of je, apart from the addition of new vocabulary, written Icelandic has not changed substantially since the 11th century, when the first texts were written on vellum

17.
Korean language
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It is also one of the two official languages in the Yanbian Korean Autonomous Prefecture and Changbai Korean Autonomous County of the Peoples Republic of China. Approximately 80 million people worldwide speak Korean and this implies that Korean is not an isolate, but a member of a small family. There is still debate on whether Korean and Japanese are related with each other, the Korean language is agglutinative in its morphology and SOV in its syntax. A relation of Korean with Japonic languages has been proposed by linguists like William George Aston, Chinese characters arrived in Korea together with Buddhism during the pre-Three Kingdoms period. Mainly privileged elites were educated to read and write in hanja, however, today, the hanja are largely unused in everyday life, but in South Korea they experience revivals on artistic works and are important in historic and/or linguistic studies of Korean. Since the Korean War, through 70 years of separation, North–South differences have developed in standard Korean, including variations in pronunciation, verb inflection, the Korean names for the language are based on the names for Korea used in North Korea and South Korea. In South Korea, the Korean language is referred to by names including hanguk-eo Korean language, hanguk-mal, Korean speech and uri-mal. In hanguk-eo and hanguk-mal, the first part of the word, hanguk, refers to the Korean nation while -eo and -mal mean language and speech, Korean is also simply referred to as guk-eo, literally national language. This name is based on the same Chinese characters meaning nation + language that are used in Taiwan and Japan to refer to their respective national languages. In North Korea and China, the language is most often called Chosŏn-mal, or more formally, the English word Korean is derived from Goryeo, which is thought to be the first dynasty known to Western countries. Korean people in the former USSR refer to themselves as Koryo-saram and Goryeo In, the majority of historical and modern linguists classify Korean as a language isolate. Such factors of typological divergence as Middle Mongolians exhibition of gender agreement can be used to argue that a relationship with Altaic is unlikely. Sergei Anatolyevich Starostin found about 25% of potential cognates in the Japanese–Korean 100-word Swadesh list, a good example might be Middle Korean sàm and Japanese asa, meaning hemp. Also, the doublet wo meaning hemp is attested in Western Old Japanese and it is thus plausible to assume a borrowed term. Among ancient languages, various relatives of Korean have been proposed. Some classify the language of Jeju Island as a distinct modern Koreanic language, Other famous theories are the Dravido-Korean languages theory and the mostly unknown southern-theory which suggest an Austronesian relation. Korean is spoken by the Korean people in North Korea and South Korea and by the Korean diaspora in countries including the Peoples Republic of China, the United States, Japan. Korean-speaking minorities exist in these states, but because of cultural assimilation into host countries, Korean is the official language of South Korea and North Korea

18.
Segment (linguistics)
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In linguistics, a segment is any discrete unit that can be identified, either physically or auditorily, in the stream of speech. Segments are called discrete because they are separate and individual, such as consonants and vowels, other contrastive elements of speech, such as prosody, and sometimes secondary articulations such as nasalization, may coexist with multiple segments and cannot be discretely ordered with them. In phonetics, the smallest perceptible segment is a phone, in phonology, there is a subfield of segmental phonology that deals with the analysis of speech into phonemes, which correspond fairly well to phonetic segments of the analysed speech. The segmental phonemes of sign language are visual movements of hands, face and they occur in a distinct spatial and temporal order. The SignWriting script represents the order of the segments with a spatial cluster of graphemes. Other notations for sign language use an order that implies a spatial order. Marginal segments, especially in words, are often the source of new segments in the general inventory of a language. This appears to have been the case with English /ʒ/, which only occurred in French loans. Some contrastive elements of speech cannot be analyzed as distinct segments. These elements are called suprasegmental, and include intonation and stress, in some languages nasality and vowel harmony are considered suprasegmental or prosodic by some phonologists. Crystal, David, A Dictionary of Linguistics & Phonetics, Blackwell, gussenhoven, Carlos, Jacobs, Haike, Understanding Phonology, Hodder & Arnold. Bussmann, Hadumod, Routledge Dictionary of Language and Linguistics, Routledge, ISBN 978-1-134-63038-7 Emic unit

19.
Tone (linguistics)
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Tone is the use of pitch in language to distinguish lexical or grammatical meaning – that is, to distinguish or to inflect words. Languages that do have this feature are called tonal languages, the tone patterns of such a language are sometimes called tonemes /ˈtoʊniːm/. Tonal languages are common in Africa, East Asia, and Mexico. In many tonal African languages, such as most Bantu languages, tones are distinguished by their pitch relative to each other. In multisyllable words, a tone may be carried by the entire word rather than a different tone on each syllable. Often, grammatical information, such as past versus present, I versus you, many words, especially monosyllabic ones, are differentiated solely by tone. In a multisyllabic word, each syllable often carries its own tone, unlike in Bantu systems, tone plays little role in modern Chinese grammar though the tones descend from features in Old Chinese that had morphological significance. Contour systems are typical of languages of the Mainland Southeast Asia linguistic area, including Tai–Kadai, Vietic, the Afroasiatic, Khoisan, Niger-Congo and Nilo-Saharan languages spoken in Africa are dominated by register systems. Many languages use tone in a limited way. In Japanese, fewer than half of the words have a drop in pitch, such minimal systems are sometimes called pitch accent since they are reminiscent of stress accent languages, which typically allow one principal stressed syllable per word. However, there is debate over the definition of pitch accent, most languages of Sub-Saharan Africa are members of the Niger-Congo family, which is predominantly tonal, notably excepting Swahili, most languages spoken in the Senegambia, Koyra Chiini and Fulani. The Afroasiatic languages include both tonal and nontonal branches, numerous tonal languages are widely spoken in China and Mainland Southeast Asia. Sino-Tibetan and Tai-Kadai languages are tonal, including Thai, Lao. The Hmong–Mien languages are some of the most tonal languages in the world, Austroasiatic and Austronesian languages are mostly non tonal with the rare exception of Austroasiatic languages like Vietnamese, and Austronesian languages like Cèmuhî and Utsul. Tones in Vietnamese and Utsul may result from heavy Chinese influence on both languages, there were tones in Middle Korean. Other languages represented in the region, such as Mongolian, Uyghur, in Europe, Swedish, Norwegian, Serbo-Croat, Slovene, Lithuanian, Latvian and Luxemburgish have tonal characteristics. Among the Indo-European languages of Asia, three Indo-Aryan languages have tonality, Punjabi, Dogri and Lahnda, although the Austronesian language family has some tonal members such as New Caledonias Cèmuhî language, no tonal languages have been discovered in Australia. A large number of North, South and Central American languages are tonal, including many of the Athabaskan languages of Alaska and the American Southwest, among the Mayan languages, which are mostly non-tonal, Yucatec, Uspantek, and one dialect of Tzotzil have developed tone systems

20.
French language
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French is a Romance language of the Indo-European family. It descended from the Vulgar Latin of the Roman Empire, as did all Romance languages, French has evolved from Gallo-Romance, the spoken Latin in Gaul, and more specifically in Northern Gaul. Its closest relatives are the other langues doïl—languages historically spoken in northern France and in southern Belgium, French was also influenced by native Celtic languages of Northern Roman Gaul like Gallia Belgica and by the Frankish language of the post-Roman Frankish invaders. Today, owing to Frances past overseas expansion, there are numerous French-based creole languages, a French-speaking person or nation may be referred to as Francophone in both English and French. French is a language in 29 countries, most of which are members of la francophonie. As of 2015, 40% of the population is in Europe, 35% in sub-Saharan Africa, 15% in North Africa and the Middle East, 8% in the Americas. French is the fourth-most widely spoken mother tongue in the European Union, 1/5 of Europeans who do not have French as a mother tongue speak French as a second language. As a result of French and Belgian colonialism from the 17th and 18th century onward, French was introduced to new territories in the Americas, Africa, most second-language speakers reside in Francophone Africa, in particular Gabon, Algeria, Mauritius, Senegal and Ivory Coast. In 2015, French was estimated to have 77 to 110 million native speakers, approximately 274 million people are able to speak the language. The Organisation internationale de la Francophonie estimates 700 million by 2050, in 2011, Bloomberg Businessweek ranked French the third most useful language for business, after English and Standard Mandarin Chinese. Under the Constitution of France, French has been the language of the Republic since 1992. France mandates the use of French in official government publications, public education except in specific cases, French is one of the four official languages of Switzerland and is spoken in the western part of Switzerland called Romandie, of which Geneva is the largest city. French is the language of about 23% of the Swiss population. French is also a language of Luxembourg, Monaco, and Aosta Valley, while French dialects remain spoken by minorities on the Channel Islands. A plurality of the worlds French-speaking population lives in Africa and this number does not include the people living in non-Francophone African countries who have learned French as a foreign language. Due to the rise of French in Africa, the total French-speaking population worldwide is expected to reach 700 million people in 2050, French is the fastest growing language on the continent. French is mostly a language in Africa, but it has become a first language in some urban areas, such as the region of Abidjan, Ivory Coast and in Libreville. There is not a single African French, but multiple forms that diverged through contact with various indigenous African languages, sub-Saharan Africa is the region where the French language is most likely to expand, because of the expansion of education and rapid population growth

21.
Mandarin Chinese
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Mandarin is a group of related varieties of Chinese spoken across most of northern and southwestern China. The group includes the Beijing dialect, the basis of Standard Mandarin or Standard Chinese, because most Mandarin dialects are found in the north, the group is sometimes referred to as the Northern dialects. Many local Mandarin varieties are not mutually intelligible, nevertheless, Mandarin is often placed first in any list of languages by number of native speakers. Most Mandarin varieties have four tones, the final stops of Middle Chinese have disappeared in most of these varieties, but some have merged them as a final glottal stop. Many Mandarin varieties, including the Beijing dialect, retain retroflex initial consonants, the capital has been within the Mandarin area for most of the last millennium, making these dialects very influential. Some form of Mandarin has served as a lingua franca since the 14th century. In the early 20th century, a form based on the Beijing dialect. Standard Chinese is the language of the Peoples Republic of China and Taiwan. Since their native varieties were often mutually unintelligible, these officials communicated using a Koiné language based on various northern varieties, when Jesuit missionaries learned this standard language in the 16th century, they called it Mandarin, from its Chinese name Guānhuà, or language of the officials. In everyday English, Mandarin refers to Standard Chinese, which is called simply Chinese. Standard Chinese is based on the particular Mandarin dialect spoken in Beijing, with some lexical and it is the official spoken language of the Peoples Republic of China, the official language of the Republic of China, and one of the four official languages of the Republic of Singapore. It also functions as the language of instruction in Mainland China and it is one of the six official languages of the United Nations, under the name Chinese. Chinese speakers refer to the standard language as Pǔtōnghuà in Mainland China, Guóyǔ in Taiwan, or Huáyǔ in Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia and Philippines. Linguists use the term Mandarin to refer to the group of dialects spoken in northern and southwestern China. The alternative term Běifānghuà, or Northern dialects, is used less and less among Chinese linguists, by extension, the term Old Mandarin or Early Mandarin is used by linguists to refer to the northern dialects recorded in materials from the Yuan dynasty. Native speakers who are not academic linguists may not recognize that the variants they speak are classified in linguistics as members of Mandarin in a broader sense, the hundreds of modern local varieties of Chinese developed from regional variants of Old Chinese and Middle Chinese. Traditionally, seven groups of dialects have been recognized. Aside from Mandarin, the six are Wu, Gan and Xiang in central China

22.
Interrogative particle
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An interrogative word or question word is a function word used to ask a question, such as what, when, where, who, whom, why, and how. They are sometimes called wh-words, because in English most of them start with wh- and they may be used in both direct questions and in indirect questions. In English and various languages the same forms are also used as relative pronouns in certain relative clauses. A particular type of word is the interrogative particle, which serves to convert a statement into a yes–no question. Examples include est-ce que in French, ли li in Russian, czy in Polish, কি ki in Bengali, 吗 ma in Chinese, mı/mi in Turkish, such particles contrast with other interrogative words, which form what are called wh-questions rather than yes–no questions. For more information about the rules for forming questions in various languages. Ultimately, the English interrogative pronouns, derive from the Proto-Indo-European root kwo- or kwi and these underwent further sound changes and spelling changes, notably wh-cluster reductions, resulting in the initial sound being either /w/ or /h/ and the initial spelling being either wh or h. This was the result of two sound changes – /hw/ > /h/ before /uː/ and /hw/ > /w/ otherwise – and the change from hw to wh in Middle English. In how, the w merged into the lave of the word, as it did in Old Frisian hū, hō, in English, the gradual change of voiceless stops into voiceless fricatives during the development of Germanic languages is responsible for wh- of interrogatives. Although some varieties of American English and various Scottish dialects still preserve the original sound, other interrogative words, such as which, how, where, whence, or whither, derive either from compounds, or other words from the same root. Most English interrogative words can take the suffix -ever, to words such as whatever and wherever. These words have the main meanings, As more emphatic interrogative words, often expressing disbelief or puzzlement in mainly rhetorical questions. To form free relative clauses, as in Ill do whatever you do, Whoever challenges us shall be punished, in this use, the nominal -ever words can be regarded as indefinite pronouns or as relative pronouns. To form adverbial clauses with the meaning no matter where/who/etc, wherever they hide, I will find them. A frequent class of words in several other languages is the interrogative verb, Korean. Weather-nominative be_how-politeness fifth level-interrogative suffix Hows the weather, mongolian, Chi yaa-vch jaahan huuhed bish gej bi bod-jii-ne You do_what-concessive small child not that I think-progressive-nonpast Whatever you do, I think you’re not a small child

23.
Ancient Greek
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Ancient Greek includes the forms of Greek used in ancient Greece and the ancient world from around the 9th century BC to the 6th century AD. It is often divided into the Archaic period, Classical period. It is antedated in the second millennium BC by Mycenaean Greek, the language of the Hellenistic phase is known as Koine. Koine is regarded as a historical stage of its own, although in its earliest form it closely resembled Attic Greek. Prior to the Koine period, Greek of the classic and earlier periods included several regional dialects, Ancient Greek was the language of Homer and of fifth-century Athenian historians, playwrights, and philosophers. It has contributed many words to English vocabulary and has been a subject of study in educational institutions of the Western world since the Renaissance. This article primarily contains information about the Epic and Classical phases of the language, Ancient Greek was a pluricentric language, divided into many dialects. The main dialect groups are Attic and Ionic, Aeolic, Arcadocypriot, some dialects are found in standardized literary forms used in literature, while others are attested only in inscriptions. There are also several historical forms, homeric Greek is a literary form of Archaic Greek used in the epic poems, the Iliad and Odyssey, and in later poems by other authors. Homeric Greek had significant differences in grammar and pronunciation from Classical Attic, the origins, early form and development of the Hellenic language family are not well understood because of a lack of contemporaneous evidence. Several theories exist about what Hellenic dialect groups may have existed between the divergence of early Greek-like speech from the common Proto-Indo-European language and the Classical period and they have the same general outline, but differ in some of the detail. The invasion would not be Dorian unless the invaders had some relationship to the historical Dorians. The invasion is known to have displaced population to the later Attic-Ionic regions, the Greeks of this period believed there were three major divisions of all Greek people—Dorians, Aeolians, and Ionians, each with their own defining and distinctive dialects. Often non-west is called East Greek, Arcadocypriot apparently descended more closely from the Mycenaean Greek of the Bronze Age. Boeotian had come under a strong Northwest Greek influence, and can in some respects be considered a transitional dialect, thessalian likewise had come under Northwest Greek influence, though to a lesser degree. Most of the dialect sub-groups listed above had further subdivisions, generally equivalent to a city-state and its surrounding territory, Doric notably had several intermediate divisions as well, into Island Doric, Southern Peloponnesus Doric, and Northern Peloponnesus Doric. The Lesbian dialect was Aeolic Greek and this dialect slowly replaced most of the older dialects, although Doric dialect has survived in the Tsakonian language, which is spoken in the region of modern Sparta. Doric has also passed down its aorist terminations into most verbs of Demotic Greek, by about the 6th century AD, the Koine had slowly metamorphosized into Medieval Greek

24.
Daniel Jones (phonetician)
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Daniel Jones was a London-born British phonetician who studied under Paul Passy, professor of phonetics at the École des Hautes Études at the Sorbonne. He was head of the Department of Phonetics at University College, in 1900, Jones studied briefly at William Tillys Marburg Language Institute in Germany, where he was first introduced to phonetics. In 1903, he received his BA degree in mathematics at Cambridge, from 1905 to 1906, he studied in Paris under Paul Passy, who was one of the founders of the International Phonetic Association, and in 1911, he married Passys niece Cyrille Motte. He briefly took lessons from the British phonetician Henry Sweet. In 1907, he became a lecturer at University College London and was afterwards appointed to a full-time position. In 1912, he became the head of the Department of Phonetics and was appointed to a chair in 1921, a post he held until his retirement in 1949. From 1906 onwards, Jones was an member of the International Phonetic Association, and was Assistant Secretary from 1907 to 1927, Secretary from 1927 to 1949. In 1909, Jones wrote the short Pronunciation of English, a book he later radically revised, the year 1917 was a landmark for Jones in many ways. He became the first linguist in the world to use the term phoneme in its current sense. It was here that the vowel diagram made a first appearance. A similar work for US English was published in 1944 by Kenyon, the problem of the phonetic description of vowels is of long standing, going back to the era of the ancient Indian linguists. Three nineteenth-century British phoneticians worked on this topic, alexander Melville Bell devised an ingenious iconic phonetic alphabet which included an elaborate system for vowels. Alexander Ellis had also suggested vowel symbols for his phonetic alphabets, Henry Sweet did much work on the systematic description of vowels, producing an elaborate system of vowel description involving a multitude of symbols. Much of the inspiration for this scheme can be found in the publications of Paul Passy. In the original form of the Cardinal Vowels, Jones employed a system of description based on the supposed height of the tongue arch together with the shape of the lips. This he reduced to a simple diagram which could be used to help visualize how vowels are articulated. Tongue height is represented on the axis and front vs. back on the horizontal axis indicates the portion of the tongue raised on the horizontal axis. Lip-rounding is also built into the system, so that front vowels have spread or neutral lip postures, Jones thus arrived at a set of eight primary Cardinal Vowels, and recorded these on gramophone disc for HMV in 1917

25.
Nikolai Trubetzkoy
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Prince Nikolai Sergeyevich Trubetzkoy was a Russian linguist and historian whose teachings formed a nucleus of the Prague School of structural linguistics. He is widely considered to be the founder of morphophonology and he was also associated with the Russian Eurasianists. Trubetzkoy was born into an extremely refined environment and his father, Sergei Nikolaevich Trubetskoy, came from a Gediminid princely family. In 1908, he enrolled at the Moscow University, while spending some time at the University of Leipzig, Trubetzkoy was taught by August Leskien, a pioneer of research into sound laws. Having graduated from the Moscow University, Trubetzkoy delivered lectures there until the Revolution, thereafter he moved first to the University of Rostov-on-Don, then to the University of Sofia, and finally took the chair of Professor of Slavic Philology at the University of Vienna. He died from an attack attributed to Nazi persecution following his publishing an article highly critical of Hitlers theories. His magnum opus, Grundzüge der Phonologie, was issued posthumously, in this book he famously defined the phoneme as the smallest distinctive unit within the structure of a given language. This work was crucial in establishing phonology as a separate from phonetics. It is sometimes hard to distinguish Trubetzkoys views from those of his friend Roman Jakobson, anderson, Stephen R. Phonology in the Twentieth Century. Theories of Rules and Theories of Representations, Chicago, The University of Chicago Press. Intellectual Biography of Nikolai Trubetzkoy at the Gallery of Russian Thinkers

26.
Structuralism
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It works to uncover the structures that underlie all the things that humans do, think, perceive, and feel. Alternatively, as summarized by philosopher Simon Blackburn, structuralism is the belief that phenomena of life are not intelligible except through their interrelations. These relations constitute a structure, and behind local variations in the surface there are constant laws of abstract culture. Structuralism in Europe developed in the early 1900s, in the linguistics of Ferdinand de Saussure. French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss was arguably the first such scholar, sparking a widespread interest in structuralism, the structuralist mode of reasoning has been applied in a diverse range of fields, including anthropology, sociology, psychology, literary criticism, economics and architecture. The most prominent thinkers associated with structuralism include Claude Lévi-Strauss, linguist Roman Jakobson, as an intellectual movement, structuralism was initially presumed to be the heir apparent to existentialism. Though elements of their work necessarily relate to structuralism and are informed by it, in the 1970s, structuralism was criticized for its rigidity and ahistoricism. The term structuralism is a term that describes a particular philosophical/literary movement or moment. The origins of structuralism connect with the work of Ferdinand de Saussure on linguistics, along with the linguistics of the Prague, in brief, de Saussures structural linguistics propounded three related concepts. De Saussure argued for a distinction between langue and parole and he argued that the sign was composed of both a signified, an abstract concept or idea, and a signifier, the perceived sound/visual image. Because different languages have different words to describe the objects or concepts. Signs thus gain their meaning from their relationships and contrasts with other signs, as he wrote, in language, there are only differences without positive terms. Blending Freud and de Saussure, the French structuralist Jacques Lacan applied structuralism to psychoanalysis and, in a different way, in this foreword Althusser states the following, Despite the precautions we took to distinguish ourselves from the structuralist ideology. Despite the decisive intervention of categories foreign to structuralism, the terminology we employed was too close in many respects to the structuralist terminology not to give rise to an ambiguity. Our interpretation of Marx has generally been recognized and judged, in homage to the current fashion and we believe that despite the terminological ambiguity, the profound tendency of our texts was not attached to the structuralist ideology. In a later development, feminist theorist Alison Assiter enumerated four ideas that she says are common to the forms of structuralism. First, that a structure determines the position of each element of a whole, second, that every system has a structure. Third, structural laws deal with co-existence rather than change, fourth, structures are the real things that lie beneath the surface or the appearance of meaning

27.
Ferdinand de Saussure
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Ferdinand Mongin de Saussure was a Swiss linguist and semiotician. His ideas laid a foundation for significant developments in both linguistics and semiology in the 20th century. He is widely considered one of the founders of 20th-century linguistics, one of his translators, Roy Harris, summarized Saussures contribution to linguistics and the study of the whole range of human sciences. It is particularly marked in linguistics, philosophy, psychology, sociology and anthropology, although they have undergone extension and critique over time, the dimensions of organization introduced by Saussure continue to inform contemporary approaches to the phenomenon of language. Prague school linguist Jan Mukařovský writes that Saussures discovery of the structure of the linguistic sign differentiated the sign both from mere acoustic things. And from mental processes, and that in this development new roads were opened not only for linguistics. He was born in Geneva in 1857 and his father was Henri Louis Frédéric de Saussure, a chemist, entomologist, and taxonomist. Saussure showed signs of talent and intellectual ability as early as the age of fourteen. In the fall of 1970, he began attending the Institution Martine, there he lived with the family of fellow classmate, Elie David. Saussure was not pleased, as he complained, I entered the Collège de Genève, after a year of studying Latin, Ancient Greek and Sanskrit and taking a variety of courses at the University of Geneva, he commenced graduate work at the University of Leipzig in 1876. Two years later, at 21, Saussure published a book entitled Mémoire sur le système primitif des voyelles dans les langues indo-européennes and he returned to Leipzig to defend his doctoral dissertation De lemploi du génitif absolu en Sanscrit, and was awarded his doctorate in February 1880. Soon, he relocated to the University of Paris, where he lectured on Sanskrit, Gothic and Old High German and he taught at the École pratique des hautes études for eleven years during which he was named Chevalier de la Légion dHonneur. When offered a professorship in Geneva in 1892, he returned to Switzerland, Saussure lectured on Sanskrit and Indo-European at the University of Geneva for the remainder of his life. It was not until 1907 that Saussure began teaching the Course of General Linguistics and he died in 1913 in Vufflens-le-Château, Vaud, Switzerland. His brother was the Esperantist René de Saussure, and his son was the psychoanalyst Raymond de Saussure, Saussure attempted, at various times in the 1880s and 1890s, to write a book on general linguistic matters. Saussure also had a impact on the development of linguistic theory in the first half of the 20th century. His two currents of thought emerged independently of other, one in Europe, the other in America. The results of each incorporated the basic notions of Saussures thought in forming the central tenets of structural linguistics, in Europe, the most important work in that period of influence was done by the Prague school

28.
Edward Sapir
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Edward Sapir was an American anthropologist-linguist, who is widely considered to be one of the most important figures in the early development of the discipline of linguistics. Sapir was born in German Pomerania, his parents emigrated to United States of America when he was a child and he studied Germanic linguistics at Columbia, where he came under the influence of Franz Boas who inspired him to work on Native American languages. While finishing his Ph. D. he went to California to work with Alfred Kroeber documenting the indigenous languages there. He was employed by the Geological Survey of Canada for fifteen years, where he came into his own as one of the most significant linguists in North America, the other being Leonard Bloomfield. He was offered a professorship at the University of Chicago, by the end of his life he was professor of anthropology at Yale, where he never really fit in. Among his many students were the linguists Mary Haas and Morris Swadesh, with his linguistic background, Sapir became the one student of Boas to develop most completely the relationship between linguistics and anthropology. Sapir studied the ways in which language and culture influence each other and this part of his thinking was developed by his student Benjamin Lee Whorf into the principle of linguistic relativity or the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. Among his major contributions to linguistics is his classification of Indigenous languages of the Americas and he played an important role in developing the modern concept of the phoneme, greatly advancing the understanding of phonology. Sapir was the first to prove that the methods of comparative linguistics were equally valid when applied to indigenous languages and he was the first to produce evidence for the classification of the Algic, Uto-Aztecan, and Na-Dene languages. He proposed some language families that are not considered to have been adequately demonstrated and he specialized in the study of Athabascan languages, Chinookan languages, and Uto-Aztecan languages, producing important grammatical descriptions of Takelma, Wishram, Southern Paiute. Later in his career he worked with Yiddish, Hebrew, and Chinese, as well as Germanic languages. Sapir was born into a family of Lithuanian Jews in Lauenburg in the Province of Pomerania where his father, Jacob David Sapir, the family was not Orthodox, and his father maintained his ties to Judaism through its music. The Sapir family did not stay long in Pomerania and never accepted German as a nationality, Edward Sapirs first language was Yiddish, and later English. In 1888, when he was four years old, the moved to Liverpool, England. Here Edward Sapir lost his younger brother Max to typhoid fever and his father had difficulty keeping a job in a synagogue and finally settled in New York on the Lower East Side, where the family lived in poverty. As Jacob Sapir could not provide for his family, Sapirs mother, Eva Seagal Sapir, even though Eva Sapir was an important influence, Sapir received his lust for knowledge and interest in scholarship, aesthetics, and music from his father. At age 14 Sapir won a Pulitzer scholarship to the prestigious Horace Mann high school, and saving the scholarship money for his college education. Through the scholarship Sapir supplemented his mothers meager earnings, Sapir entered Columbia in 1901, still paying with the Pulitzer scholarship

29.
Generative linguistics
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Generative grammar is a linguistic theory that regards grammar as a system of rules that generates exactly those combinations of words that form grammatical sentences in a given language. Noam Chomsky first used the term in relation to the linguistics of grammar that he developed in the late 1950s. Linguists who follow the approach have been called generativists. The generative school has focused on the study of syntax, but has also addressed other aspects of a languages structure, early versions of Chomskys theory were called transformational grammar, which is still used as a general term that includes his subsequent theories. There are a number of versions of generative grammar currently practiced within linguistics, a contrasting approach is that of constraint-based grammars. Where a generative grammar attempts to list all the rules that result in all well-formed sentences, in stochastic grammar, grammatical correctness is taken as a probabilistic variable, rather than a discrete property. There are a number of different approaches to generative grammar, common to all is the effort to come up with a set of rules or principles that formally defines each and every one of the members of the set of well-formed expressions of a natural language. Chomsky, in an acceptance speech delivered in India in 2001. Generative grammar has been under development since the late 1950s, and has many changes in the types of rules. In tracing the development of ideas within generative grammar, it is useful to refer to various stages in the development of the theory. The so-called standard theory corresponds to the model of generative grammar laid out by Chomsky in 1965. A core aspect of standard theory is the distinction between two different representations of a sentence, called deep structure and surface structure, the two representations are linked to each other by transformational grammar. The so-called extended standard theory was formulated in the late 1960s, features are, syntactic constraints generalized phrase structures The so-called revised extended standard theory was formulated between 1973 and 1976. It contains restrictions upon X-bar theory, move α An alternative model of syntax based on the idea that notions like subject, direct object, and indirect object play a primary role in grammar. Chomskys Lectures on Government and Binding and Barriers, generative grammars can be described and compared, with the aid of the Chomsky hierarchy in the 1950s. This sets out a series of types of formal grammars with increasing expressive power, at a higher level of complexity are the context-free grammars. The derivation of a sentence by such a grammar can be depicted as a derivation tree, linguists working within generative grammar often view such trees as a primary object of study. According to this view, a sentence is not merely a string of words, such a tree diagram is also called a phrase marker

30.
Noam Chomsky
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Avram Noam Chomsky is an American linguist, philosopher, cognitive scientist, historian, social critic, and political activist. Sometimes described as the father of modern linguistics, Chomsky is also a figure in analytic philosophy. Ideologically, he aligns with anarcho-syndicalism and libertarian socialism, born to middle-class Ashkenazi Jewish immigrants in Philadelphia, Chomsky developed an early interest in anarchism from alternative bookstores in New York City. At the age of sixteen he began studies at the University of Pennsylvania, taking courses in linguistics, mathematics, and philosophy. From 1951 to 1955 he was appointed to Harvard Universitys Society of Fellows and he is credited as the creator or co-creator of the universal grammar theory, the generative grammar theory, the Chomsky hierarchy, and the minimalist program. Chomsky also played a role in the decline of behaviorism. Associated with the New Left, he was arrested multiple times for his activism, while expanding his work in linguistics over subsequent decades, he also became involved in the Linguistics Wars. In collaboration with Edward S. Herman, Chomsky later co-wrote an analysis articulating the propaganda model of media criticism, however, his defense of unconditional freedom of speech—including for Holocaust deniers—generated significant controversy in the Faurisson affair of the early 1980s. Following his retirement from teaching, he has continued his vocal political activism, including opposing the War on Terror. One of the most cited scholars in history, Chomsky has influenced an array of academic fields. Avram Noam Chomsky was born on December 7,1928, in the East Oak Lane neighborhood of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania and his father was William Zev Chomsky, an Ashkenazi Jew originally from Ukraine who had fled to the United States in 1913. Chomskys mother was the Belarusian-born Elsie Simonofsky, a teacher and activist whom William had met while working at Mikveh Israel, Noam was the Chomsky familys first child. His younger brother, David Eli Chomsky, was five years later. The brothers were close, although David was more easygoing while Noam could be very competitive, as a Jew, Chomsky faced anti-semitism as a child, particularly from the Irish and German communities living in Philadelphia. He was substantially influenced by his uncle who owned a newspaper stand in New York City, whenever visiting his uncle, Chomsky frequented left-wing and anarchist bookstores in the city, voraciously reading political literature. He later described his discovery of anarchism as an accident, because it allowed him to become critical of other far-left ideologies, namely Stalinism. Chomskys primary education was at Oak Lane Country Day School, an independent Deweyite institution that focused on allowing its pupils to pursue their own interests in a non-competitive atmosphere. It was here, at age 10, that he wrote his first article, on the spread of fascism, from the age of 12 or 13, he identified more fully with anarchist politics

31.
Morris Halle
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Morris Halle, is a Latvian-American linguist and an Institute Professor and professor emeritus of linguistics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He also co-authored the earliest theory of generative metrics, Halle was born Jewish in Liepāja, Latvia, in 1923, and moved with his family to Riga in 1929. They arrived in the United States in 1940, from 1941 to 1943, he studied engineering at the City College of New York. He entered the United States Army in 1943 and was discharged in 1946, at which point he went to the University of Chicago, where he got his masters degree in linguistics in 1948. He then studied at Columbia University under Roman Jakobson, became a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1951 and he retired from MIT in 1996, but he remains active in research and publication. He is fluent in German, Yiddish, Latvian, Russian, Hebrew, Halle was married for fifty-six years to artist Rosamond Thaxter Strong Halle, until her death in April 2011. He has three sons, David, John and Timothy, Halle currently resides in Cambridge, Massachusetts

32.
Phonology
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Phonology is a branch of linguistics concerned with the systematic organization of sounds in languages. Phonology also includes the study of equivalent organizational systems in sign languages, the word phonology can also refer to the phonological system of a given language. This is one of the systems which a language is considered to comprise, like its syntax. Phonology is often distinguished from phonetics, note that this distinction was not always made, particularly before the development of the modern concept of the phoneme in the mid 20th century. The word phonology comes from Ancient Greek φωνή, phōnḗ, voice, sound, according to Clark et al. it means the systematic use of sound to encode meaning in any spoken human language, or the field of linguistics studying this use. The history of phonology may be traced back to the Ashtadhyayi, Baudouin de Courtenays work, though often unacknowledged, is considered to be the starting point of modern phonology. He also worked on the theory of alternations, and may have had an influence on the work of Saussure according to E. F. K. Koerner. An influential school of phonology in the period was the Prague school. One of its members was Prince Nikolai Trubetzkoy, whose Grundzüge der Phonologie. Directly influenced by Baudouin de Courtenay, Trubetzkoy is considered the founder of morphophonology, Trubetzkoy also developed the concept of the archiphoneme. Another important figure in the Prague school was Roman Jakobson, who was one of the most prominent linguists of the 20th century, in 1968 Noam Chomsky and Morris Halle published The Sound Pattern of English, the basis for generative phonology. In this view, phonological representations are sequences of segments made up of distinctive features and these features were an expansion of earlier work by Roman Jakobson, Gunnar Fant, and Morris Halle. The features describe aspects of articulation and perception, are from a fixed set. There are at least two levels of representation, underlying representation and surface phonetic representation, ordered phonological rules govern how underlying representation is transformed into the actual pronunciation. An important consequence of the influence SPE had on phonological theory was the downplaying of the syllable, furthermore, the generativists folded morphophonology into phonology, which both solved and created problems. Natural phonology is a based on the publications of its proponent David Stampe in 1969. In this view, phonology is based on a set of phonological processes that interact with one another, which ones are active. Rather than acting on segments, phonological processes act on distinctive features within prosodic groups, prosodic groups can be as small as a part of a syllable or as large as an entire utterance

PhoneME
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A phoneme is one of the units of sound that distinguish one word from another in a particular language. The difference in meaning between the English words kill and kiss is a result of the exchange of the phoneme /l/ for the phoneme /s/, two words that differ in meaning through a contrast of a single phoneme form a minimal pair. In linguistics, pho

1.
A simplified procedure for determining whether two sounds represent the same or different phonemes

Linguistics
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Linguistics is the scientific study of language, and involves an analysis of language form, language meaning, and language in context. Linguists traditionally analyse human language by observing an interplay between sound and meaning, phonetics is the study of speech and non-speech sounds, and delves into their acoustic and articulatory properties.

1.
Ancient Tamil inscription at Thanjavur

2.
Topics and terminology

Abstraction
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An abstraction is the product of this process — a concept that acts as a super-categorical noun for all subordinate concepts, and connects any related concepts as a group, field, or category. Conceptual abstractions may be formed by filtering the information content of a concept or an observable phenomenon, in a type–token distinction, a type is mo

1.
Cat on Mat (picture 1)

Equivalence class
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In mathematics, when the elements of some set S have a notion of equivalence defined on them, then one may naturally split the set S into equivalence classes. These equivalence classes are constructed so that elements a and b belong to the equivalence class if. Formally, given a set S and an equivalence relation ~ on S and it may be proven from the

1.
Congruence is an example of an equivalence relation. The two triangles on the left are congruent triangles, while the third and fourth triangles are not congruent to any other triangle. Thus, the first two triangles are in the same equivalence class, while the third and fourth triangles are each in their own equivalence class.

Bracket
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A bracket is a tall punctuation mark typically used in matched pairs within text, to set apart or interject other text. The matched pair may be described as opening and closing, or left, forms include round, square, curly, and angle brackets, and various other pairs of symbols. Chevrons were the earliest type of bracket to appear in written English

1.
Move up

Allophone
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In phonology, an allophone is one of a set of multiple possible spoken sounds or signs used to pronounce a single phoneme in a particular language. For example, and are allophones for the phoneme /p/ in the English language, the specific allophone selected in a given situation is often predictable from the phonetic context, but sometimes allophones

1.
A simplified procedure for determining whether two sounds represent the same or different phonemes. The cases on the extreme left and extreme right are those in which the sounds are allophones.

Square bracket
–
A bracket is a tall punctuation mark typically used in matched pairs within text, to set apart or interject other text. The matched pair may be described as opening and closing, or left, forms include round, square, curly, and angle brackets, and various other pairs of symbols. Chevrons were the earliest type of bracket to appear in written English

1.
Move up

Angle bracket
–
A bracket is a tall punctuation mark typically used in matched pairs within text, to set apart or interject other text. The matched pair may be described as opening and closing, or left, forms include round, square, curly, and angle brackets, and various other pairs of symbols. Chevrons were the earliest type of bracket to appear in written English

1.
Move up

Grapheme
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In linguistics, a grapheme is the smallest unit of a writing system of any given language. An individual grapheme may or may not carry meaning by itself, graphemes include alphabetic letters, typographic ligatures, Chinese characters, numerical digits, punctuation marks, and other individual symbols. The word grapheme, coined in analogy with phonem

1.
Writing systems

International Phonetic Alphabet
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The International Phonetic Alphabet is an alphabetic system of phonetic notation based primarily on the Latin alphabet. It was devised by the International Phonetic Association as a representation of the sounds of spoken language. The IPA is used by lexicographers, foreign students and teachers, linguists, speech-language pathologists, singers, act

1.
X-ray photos show the sounds [i, u, a, ɑ]

X-SAMPA
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The Extended Speech Assessment Methods Phonetic Alphabet is a variant of SAMPA developed in 1995 by John C. Wells, professor of phonetics at the University of London and it is designed to unify the individual language SAMPA alphabets, and extend SAMPA to cover the entire range of characters in the International Phonetic Alphabet. The result is a SA

Kirshenbaum
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Kirshenbaum, sometimes called ASCII-IPA or erkIPA, is a system used to represent the International Phonetic Alphabet in ASCII. This way it allows typewriting IPA-symbols by regular keyboard and it was developed for Usenet, notably the newsgroups sci. lang and alt. usage. english. It is named after Evan Kirshenbaum, who led the collaboration that cr

ASCII
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ASCII, abbreviated from American Standard Code for Information Interchange, is a character encoding standard. ASCII codes represent text in computers, telecommunications equipment, and other devices, most modern character-encoding schemes are based on ASCII, although they support many additional characters. ASCII was developed from telegraph code a

English language
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English /ˈɪŋɡlɪʃ/ is a West Germanic language that was first spoken in early medieval England and is now the global lingua franca. Named after the Angles, one of the Germanic tribes that migrated to England, English is either the official language or one of the official languages in almost 60 sovereign states. It is the third most common language i

1.
The opening to the Old English epic poem Beowulf, handwritten in half-uncial script: Hƿæt ƿē Gārde/na ingēar dagum þēod cyninga / þrym ge frunon... "Listen! We of the Spear-Danes from days of yore have heard of the glory of the folk-kings..."

2.
Countries of the world where English is a majority native language

3.
Title page of Geoffrey Chaucer's Canterbury Tales c.1400

Allophones
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In phonology, an allophone is one of a set of multiple possible spoken sounds or signs used to pronounce a single phoneme in a particular language. For example, and are allophones for the phoneme /p/ in the English language, the specific allophone selected in a given situation is often predictable from the phonetic context, but sometimes allophones

1.
A simplified procedure for determining whether two sounds represent the same or different phonemes. The cases on the extreme left and extreme right are those in which the sounds are allophones.

Icelandic language
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Icelandic /aɪsˈlændɪk/ is a North Germanic language, the language of Iceland. It is an Indo-European language belonging to the North Germanic or Nordic branch of the Germanic languages, historically, it was the westernmost of the Indo-European languages prior to the colonisation of the Americas. Icelandic, Faroese, Norn, and Western Norwegian forme

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A page from the Landnámabók

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regions where Icelandic is the language of the majority

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Photograph taken from page 206 of Colloquial Icelandic.

4.
Eyjafjallajökull, one of the smaller ice caps of Iceland, situated to the north of Skógar and to the west of Mýrdalsjökull, is Icelandic for "glacier of Eyjafjöll"

Korean language
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It is also one of the two official languages in the Yanbian Korean Autonomous Prefecture and Changbai Korean Autonomous County of the Peoples Republic of China. Approximately 80 million people worldwide speak Korean and this implies that Korean is not an isolate, but a member of a small family. There is still debate on whether Korean and Japanese a

1.
Two names for Korean, Hangugeo and Chosŏnmal, written vertically in Hangul

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Street signs in Korean; Daegu, Korea.

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Korean writing systems

Segment (linguistics)
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In linguistics, a segment is any discrete unit that can be identified, either physically or auditorily, in the stream of speech. Segments are called discrete because they are separate and individual, such as consonants and vowels, other contrastive elements of speech, such as prosody, and sometimes secondary articulations such as nasalization, may

Tone (linguistics)
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Tone is the use of pitch in language to distinguish lexical or grammatical meaning – that is, to distinguish or to inflect words. Languages that do have this feature are called tonal languages, the tone patterns of such a language are sometimes called tonemes /ˈtoʊniːm/. Tonal languages are common in Africa, East Asia, and Mexico. In many tonal Afr

1.
The tone contours of Standard Chinese. In the convention for Chinese, 1 is low and 5 is high. The corresponding tone letters are ˥ ˧˥ ˨˩˦ ˥˩.

French language
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French is a Romance language of the Indo-European family. It descended from the Vulgar Latin of the Roman Empire, as did all Romance languages, French has evolved from Gallo-Romance, the spoken Latin in Gaul, and more specifically in Northern Gaul. Its closest relatives are the other langues doïl—languages historically spoken in northern France and

1.
The "arrêt" signs (French for "stop") are used in Canada while the international stop, which is also a valid French word, is used in France as well as other French-speaking countries and regions.

2.
Regions where French is the main language

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Town sign in Standard Arabic and French at the entrance of Rechmaya in Lebanon.

Mandarin Chinese
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Mandarin is a group of related varieties of Chinese spoken across most of northern and southwestern China. The group includes the Beijing dialect, the basis of Standard Mandarin or Standard Chinese, because most Mandarin dialects are found in the north, the group is sometimes referred to as the Northern dialects. Many local Mandarin varieties are n

1.
A page of the Menggu Ziyun, covering the syllables tsim to lim

2.
Guānhuà (Mandarin) written in Chinese characters

Interrogative particle
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An interrogative word or question word is a function word used to ask a question, such as what, when, where, who, whom, why, and how. They are sometimes called wh-words, because in English most of them start with wh- and they may be used in both direct questions and in indirect questions. In English and various languages the same forms are also use

1.
Adjectives

Ancient Greek
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Ancient Greek includes the forms of Greek used in ancient Greece and the ancient world from around the 9th century BC to the 6th century AD. It is often divided into the Archaic period, Classical period. It is antedated in the second millennium BC by Mycenaean Greek, the language of the Hellenistic phase is known as Koine. Koine is regarded as a hi

1.
Inscription about the construction of the statue of Athena Parthenos in the Parthenon, 440/439 BC

2.
Ostracon bearing the name of Cimon, Stoa of Attalos

3.
The words ΜΟΛΩΝ ΛΑΒΕ as they are inscribed on the marble of the 1955 Leonidas Monument at Thermopylae

Daniel Jones (phonetician)
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Daniel Jones was a London-born British phonetician who studied under Paul Passy, professor of phonetics at the École des Hautes Études at the Sorbonne. He was head of the Department of Phonetics at University College, in 1900, Jones studied briefly at William Tillys Marburg Language Institute in Germany, where he was first introduced to phonetics.

1.
The standard IPA vowel trapezium, an application of Jones's work.

Nikolai Trubetzkoy
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Prince Nikolai Sergeyevich Trubetzkoy was a Russian linguist and historian whose teachings formed a nucleus of the Prague School of structural linguistics. He is widely considered to be the founder of morphophonology and he was also associated with the Russian Eurasianists. Trubetzkoy was born into an extremely refined environment and his father, S

1.
Nikolai Trubetzkoy, 1920s.

Structuralism
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It works to uncover the structures that underlie all the things that humans do, think, perceive, and feel. Alternatively, as summarized by philosopher Simon Blackburn, structuralism is the belief that phenomena of life are not intelligible except through their interrelations. These relations constitute a structure, and behind local variations in th

1.
Sub-fields

2.
Sociology

Ferdinand de Saussure
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Ferdinand Mongin de Saussure was a Swiss linguist and semiotician. His ideas laid a foundation for significant developments in both linguistics and semiology in the 20th century. He is widely considered one of the founders of 20th-century linguistics, one of his translators, Roy Harris, summarized Saussures contribution to linguistics and the study

1.
Ferdinand de Saussure

Edward Sapir
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Edward Sapir was an American anthropologist-linguist, who is widely considered to be one of the most important figures in the early development of the discipline of linguistics. Sapir was born in German Pomerania, his parents emigrated to United States of America when he was a child and he studied Germanic linguistics at Columbia, where he came und

1.
Edward Sapir (about 1910)

2.
Franz Boas

3.
Tony Tillohash with family. Tillohash was Sapir's collaborator on the famous description of the Southern Paiute language

4.
Alfred Kroeber and Ishi

Generative linguistics
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Generative grammar is a linguistic theory that regards grammar as a system of rules that generates exactly those combinations of words that form grammatical sentences in a given language. Noam Chomsky first used the term in relation to the linguistics of grammar that he developed in the late 1950s. Linguists who follow the approach have been called

1.
Linguistics

Noam Chomsky
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Avram Noam Chomsky is an American linguist, philosopher, cognitive scientist, historian, social critic, and political activist. Sometimes described as the father of modern linguistics, Chomsky is also a figure in analytic philosophy. Ideologically, he aligns with anarcho-syndicalism and libertarian socialism, born to middle-class Ashkenazi Jewish i

1.
Noam Chomsky at an antiwar rally in Vancouver, 2004

2.
Anarcho-syndicalist Rudolf Rocker (left) and English democratic socialist George Orwell (right) were both influences on the young Chomsky.

4.
Noam Chomsky (1977)

Morris Halle
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Morris Halle, is a Latvian-American linguist and an Institute Professor and professor emeritus of linguistics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He also co-authored the earliest theory of generative metrics, Halle was born Jewish in Liepāja, Latvia, in 1923, and moved with his family to Riga in 1929. They arrived in the United States in

1.
Morris Halle

Phonology
–
Phonology is a branch of linguistics concerned with the systematic organization of sounds in languages. Phonology also includes the study of equivalent organizational systems in sign languages, the word phonology can also refer to the phonological system of a given language. This is one of the systems which a language is considered to comprise, lik

1.
Although originally written with the Arabic script, Swahili is now written in a Latin alphabet that was introduced by Christian missionaries and colonial administrators. The text shown here is the Catholic version of the Lord's Prayer.

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Coastal areas where Swahili or Comorian is the indigenous language,

2.
Predominantly Tagalog-speaking regions in the Philippines. The color-schemes represent the 4 dialect zones of the language: Northern, Central, Southern, and Marinduque The majority of residents in Camarines Norte and Camarines Sur speak Bikol as their first language but these provinces nonetheless have significant Tagalog minorities. In addition, Tagalog is used as a second language across the country.

1.
Red areas indicate where rural accents were rhotic in the 1950s. Based on H. Orton et al., Survey of English Dialects (1962–71). Some areas with partial rhoticity (for example parts of the East Riding of Yorkshire) are not shaded on this map.